Articles by Daniele Francesco Santamaria

‘Godscapes’ proposes to combine a material approach with the Semantic Web to investigate cultural transformation and, specifically, how external elements trigger the transformation of religiosity, resulting in new hybrid elements. Focusing on a case-study on the Levant during the second millennium BCE, the project investigates the interplay between indigenous and exogenous elements (Egyptian, Syrian, Mesopotamian, Aegean, Anatolian) in shaping polytheistic beliefs and practices through the analysis of four types of data – funerary, architectural, iconographic and textual. Thus, the project addresses a new scientific perspective emphasizing the use of material culture to understand the connection between humans and the divine. The focus is on the unravelling of past religious hybridization to grasp how the second millennium cultural and religious intermingling persisted in the syncretic experience leading to the construction of the Israelite monolatry in the first millennium BCE.

The rich epigraphic heritage of the Castello Ursino Civic Museum of Catania has been studied by the EpiCUM project that encoded it in EpiDoc TEI XML, an XML based standard digital representation for cultural heritage contents. The project made the epigraphic heritage available in a digital museum: under the guise of the ‘Voci di Pietra’ exhibition, a selection of epigraphs were presented, implementing innovative presentation modalities thanks to a smart use of technological and digital means. Information contained in the epigraphs was semantically reorganized in a unique homogeneous container, the EpiONT ontology, constructed according to the Linked Open Data paradigm and to consolidated international standards. The encoding of the ancient texts, by the TEI standard and its EpiDoc subset, is wedded to the paradigmatic semantic web model for museums and cultural heritage. The EpiONT ontology is currently populated by 580 epigraphs collected in the Castello Ursino Civic Museum. Designed according to the CIDOC CRM standard, it makes use of the SKOS vocabularies of the EAGLE project concerning material, execution technique, type of inscription, and type of support of an epigraph. The EpiONT ontology additionally can handle any uncertainty in the origin and place of discovery of the epigraphs.