HackaLOD 2022
HyperReal is an openly available Knowledge Graph that contains more than 40000 symbol-symbolic meanings relationships, also called Simulations. The structure of Hyper Real is based on the Simulation Ontology which was designed to describe symbols through N-ary relationships classes (Simulations). Simulations link together a symbol (also called Simulacrum), its symbolic meaning (also called Reality Counterpart) and the cultural context in which the symbol symbolize the symbolic meaning. An example would be the fish-happiness simulation, in which fish is the symbol, happiness is the symbolic meaning, and Buddhist is the context. A visual example of the fish-happiness simulation following the simulation ontology schema can be found in figure 1.
We used the symbols available in HyperReal to retrieve artworks that depict these symbols using the following two sources:
The NMVW collection contains artwork descriptions only in Dutch. Therefore, we translated all the symbols contained in HyperReal from English to Dutch.
To link HyperReal with WikiData, we queried WikiData to find symbols from HyperReal that are depicted in paintings in Wikidata, using the property "depicts" wikihyper.csv. To retrieve the labels of these symbols in English and in Dutch, we used MediaWiki API see Jypiter notebook. The resulting file with labels in two languages contains 2,691 entities. 191 entities did not have Dutch labels in Wikidata qids_no_nl_labels.json, so we translated English labels into Dutch using Google Translate API.
We also used the Google Translate API to translate the symbols in HyperReal that didn't exist in WikiData. Finally, we created a dataframe with symbols, both in Dutch and in English. We then used this dataframe of symbols to query NMVW using the dutch translation of the symbols.