Visual metaphors for semantic cultural heritage

During the last decade, cultural heritage has moved toward the encoding of information in semantic format. Ontologies make the description of artworks clearer, unambiguous and often self-explanatory, with advantages in terms of interoperability. In cultural heritage, the current shift toward semantic encoding opens the way to the creation of interfaces that allow the users to orientate themselves easily in media repositories through a visual representation of their properties and relationships. In order to illustrate this approach, we describe a case study in ontologies and visualization for cultural heritage, Labyrinth. In Labyrinth, the user is immersed in a 3D labyrinth where turning points and paths represent a set of cultural artifacts and the semantic relations holding among them.