Digital Cultural Heritage Twins: New Tools for a Complete Fruition of the Cultural Heritage Entities
摘要
This chapter concerns the possibility of creating a generalized access, in digital form, to all the physical and symbolic/conceptual features of any kind of Cultural Heritage (CH) entities. With the term physical, we denote all those measurable/easily quantifiable/descriptive features that are currently used to characterize a Cultural Heritage item, e.g., dimensions, support, style, and name of the artist. The term symbolic/conceptual refers to the, often disregarded, immaterial properties of these items, like the full descriptions of their inner meaning and of the emotional messages transmitted to the users. Accordingly, we conceive an in-depth digital representation of a CH item under the form of a twofold entity according to a sort of Digital Cultural Heritage Twin approach. The first component of this entity consists of the usual description of the physical characteristics of the original cultural item; the second concerns its associated Digital Cultural Heritage Twin reproducing its symbolic/conceptual properties. To validate this methodology, we have taken into account, in a first step, those very important Cultural Heritage entities like paintings, drawings, frescoes, mosaics, sculptures, and murals that represent the support of the iconographic (or pictorial) narratives, i.e., illustrated stories told to the user/observer using only visual/illustrative modalities. The Chapter will then describe how—making use of NKRL, the Narrative Knowledge Representation Language—it will be possible to create complete and expressive Digital Cultural Heritage Twins for complex iconographic narratives, like Da Vinci’s “hidden painting” that lies beneath the very famous Mona Lisa’s portrait or the Surrender of Breda by Velasquez.