Marriage is a Peach and a Chalice: Modelling Cultural Symbolism on the Semantic Web

Abstract

In this work, we fill the gap in the Semantic Web in the context of Cultural Symbolism. Building upon earlier work in \citesartini-towards-2021, we introduce the Simulation Ontology, an ontology that models the background knowledge of symbolic meanings, developed by combining the concepts taken from the authoritative theory of Simulacra and Simulations of Jean Baudrillard with symbolic structures and content taken from "Symbolism: a Comprehensive Dictionary'' by Steven Olderr. We re-engineered the symbolic knowledge already present in heterogeneous resources by converting it into our ontology schema to create HyperReal, the first knowledge graph completely dedicated to cultural symbolism. A first experiment run on the knowledge graph is presented to show the potential of quantitative research on symbolism.