Enriching Cultural Heritage Through Semantic Annotations: Prototyping and Visualizing Complex Information in the Digital Humanities

This thesis investigates how semantic annotation techniques can enrich digital images in the cultural heritage domain, addressing the challenges posed by fragmented data and limited interpretative depth. Building on the IIIF standard to ensure interoperability, it introduces the LISA (Linked Interpretative Semantic Annotation) model to capture multi-layered visual meaning and scholarly uncertainty. The thesis explores how Panofsky’s three-level iconographical method can be practically implemented within a collaborative environment, illustrated by the VISTA (Visual Interpretative Semantic Tagging Application) prototype. By integrating semantic web ontologies, structured JSON-LD data, and graph-based visualization, the project demonstrates how interpretative plurality, provenance, and complex meaning can be explicitly modeled. The findings highlight the potential of semantic annotation not only to enhance discoverability and curation of cultural objects but also to foster collaborative scholarship that treats images as rich sources of knowledge rather than mere supplementary records.