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IICONGRAPH: improved Iconographic and Iconological Statements in Knowledge Graphs

Bruno Sartini

TL;DR

IICONGRAPH tackles the persistent gaps in iconographic and iconological statements within cultural heritage knowledge graphs by re-engineering Wikidata and ArCo through the ICON ontology 2.0 and enriching their symbolism with HyperReal. The authors develop separate conversion pipelines for Wikidata and ArCo, release the integrated knowledge graph under FAIR principles, and demonstrate improved content and structural quality versus the baselines. Quantitative evaluation shows strong gains in interpretation depth and interconnectivity, while a domain-focused evaluation confirms the potential to answer research questions about serendipitous symbolic connections and level distribution. The work also outlines practical implications for cultural heritage representation and proposes future directions, including broader data ingestion, tooling, and integration with LLM-based question answering systems.

Abstract

Iconography and iconology are fundamental domains when it comes to understanding artifacts of cultural heritage. Iconography deals with the study and interpretation of visual elements depicted in artifacts and their symbolism, while iconology delves deeper, exploring the underlying cultural and historical meanings. Despite the advances in representing cultural heritage with Linked Open Data (LOD), recent studies show persistent gaps in the representation of iconographic and iconological statements in current knowledge graphs (KGs). To address them, this paper presents IICONGRAPH, a KG that was created by refining and extending the iconographic and iconological statements of ArCo (the Italian KG of cultural heritage) and Wikidata. The development of IICONGRAPH was also driven by a series of requirements emerging from research case studies that were unattainable in the non-reengineered versions of the KGs. The evaluation results demonstrate that IICONGRAPH not only outperforms ArCo and Wikidata through domain-specific assessments from the literature but also serves as a robust platform for addressing the formulated research questions. IICONGRAPH is released and documented in accordance with the FAIR principles to guarantee the resource's reusability. The algorithms used to create it and assess the research questions have also been made available to ensure transparency and reproducibility. While future work focuses on ingesting more data into the KG, and on implementing it as a backbone of LLM-based question answering systems, the current version of IICONGRAPH still emerges as a valuable asset, contributing to the evolving landscape of cultural heritage representation within Knowledge Graphs, the Semantic Web, and beyond.

IICONGRAPH: improved Iconographic and Iconological Statements in Knowledge Graphs

TL;DR

IICONGRAPH tackles the persistent gaps in iconographic and iconological statements within cultural heritage knowledge graphs by re-engineering Wikidata and ArCo through the ICON ontology 2.0 and enriching their symbolism with HyperReal. The authors develop separate conversion pipelines for Wikidata and ArCo, release the integrated knowledge graph under FAIR principles, and demonstrate improved content and structural quality versus the baselines. Quantitative evaluation shows strong gains in interpretation depth and interconnectivity, while a domain-focused evaluation confirms the potential to answer research questions about serendipitous symbolic connections and level distribution. The work also outlines practical implications for cultural heritage representation and proposes future directions, including broader data ingestion, tooling, and integration with LLM-based question answering systems.

Abstract

Iconography and iconology are fundamental domains when it comes to understanding artifacts of cultural heritage. Iconography deals with the study and interpretation of visual elements depicted in artifacts and their symbolism, while iconology delves deeper, exploring the underlying cultural and historical meanings. Despite the advances in representing cultural heritage with Linked Open Data (LOD), recent studies show persistent gaps in the representation of iconographic and iconological statements in current knowledge graphs (KGs). To address them, this paper presents IICONGRAPH, a KG that was created by refining and extending the iconographic and iconological statements of ArCo (the Italian KG of cultural heritage) and Wikidata. The development of IICONGRAPH was also driven by a series of requirements emerging from research case studies that were unattainable in the non-reengineered versions of the KGs. The evaluation results demonstrate that IICONGRAPH not only outperforms ArCo and Wikidata through domain-specific assessments from the literature but also serves as a robust platform for addressing the formulated research questions. IICONGRAPH is released and documented in accordance with the FAIR principles to guarantee the resource's reusability. The algorithms used to create it and assess the research questions have also been made available to ensure transparency and reproducibility. While future work focuses on ingesting more data into the KG, and on implementing it as a backbone of LLM-based question answering systems, the current version of IICONGRAPH still emerges as a valuable asset, contributing to the evolving landscape of cultural heritage representation within Knowledge Graphs, the Semantic Web, and beyond.
Paper Structure (19 sections, 3 figures, 4 tables)

This paper contains 19 sections, 3 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background, problem statement, and research requirements
  3. ICON ontology 2.0
  4. HyperReal
  5. Wikidata
  6. Wikidata Analysis and Problem statement
  7. Formulation of research questions for Wikidata
  8. ArCo
  9. ArCo Analysis and Problem statement
  10. Formulation of research questions for ArCo
  11. IICONGRAPH Development and Release
  12. Wikidata's Conversion
  13. ArCo's Conversion
  14. IICONGRAPH Release
  15. Quantitative Evaluation
  16. ...and 4 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Graphical Rendering of the cat-divinity simulation following the Simulation Ontology schema. The Simulacrum is the specific term used to represent symbols, while Reality Counterpart is the term used to represent symbolic meanings.
  • Figure 2: On the left: manual matching result between Wikidata's types and classes and ICON's classes related to pre-iconographical elements. On the right: manual matching result between Wikidata's types and classes and ICON's classes related to iconographical elements.
  • Figure 3: Visual Example of a standard description in ArCo and the parsing steps applied to it