The Brancacci Chapel from the Quattrocento to the semantic web: An ontology-assisted case study of cultural data management and site reconstruction

Abstract

This study proposes an ontological model for cultural heterogeneous data and cultural site reconstructions. It is based on the concept of interpretative unit, which extends the semantics of stratigraphic units also to non-archaeological contexts. The ontology is named after the case study of this research, the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. Indeed, after a state of the art overview of the development methodology and the description of the most relevant entities, a first test case is proposed. An entry of the catalogue of a recent exhibition on Masolino, a 15th century painter who worked at the decoration of the chapel, has been serialised as Turtle file and the semantics of knowledge graph has been assessed via competency questions. The positive results encourage the deepening of this line of research in the direction of connecting linked data with nodes in 3D models, as well as their visualisation and communication to non-specialist audiences.