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

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Simulation Ontology and HyperReal, a knowledge graph dedicated to cultural symbolism, enabling quantitative analysis of symbolic meanings within the Semantic Web context.

Contribution

It presents the first ontology and knowledge graph specifically modeling cultural symbolism, integrating authoritative symbolic theories and resources.

Findings

Created the Simulation Ontology for symbolic knowledge modeling

Developed HyperReal, a comprehensive cultural symbolism knowledge graph

Demonstrated potential for quantitative research on symbolism

Abstract

In this work, we fill the gap in the Semantic Web in the context of Cultural Symbolism. Building upon earlier work in, 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.