Formalization of the “Immaterial Features” Conveyed by the Iconographic Cultural Heritage Entities
Résumé
The “digitization practices” used up-to-now to produce digital counterparts of the iconographic Cultural Heritage entities – paintings, drawings, sculptures, frescoes, mosaics, murals etc. – have mainly focused on the “physical” (dimensions, materials, supports, painting etc. techniques …) aspects of these entities. This means that all the “immaterial features” that characterize these items – from the stories/narratives they tell to all sort of feelings, memories, evocations and aesthetic experiences they can evoke in their end-users – are largely neglected. We argue that, to take correctly these immaterial aspects into account, we must use particularly powerful and expressive knowledge representation systems. In this context, the paper presents and discusses then in some detail the formal representations, obtained using the NKRL’s (Narrative Knowledge Representation Language) tools, of complex iconographic situations that characterize two masterpieces of the Renaissance period. The results obtained, even if very preliminary, show that NKRL should be borne in mind as a useful tool for properly representing in digital format the “immaterial features” above.