Domain Formalization for Metaphorical Reasoning

It is commonplace that cultural heritage is always discussed and analysed by using references to figures of speech. In particular, metaphors and allegories are very frequent in ancient and historical documents, painting and sculptures. It is also frequent to have some hints about the assets and their authors by comparing their contents with elements in the domain of the figures of speech to which the asset refer. In order to enable reasoning by figures of speech, we propose here a methodology able to link concepts in the domain of cultural assets with concepts in the domain of the figure of speech. We show here how reasoning in all these domains help in discovering some elements related to the cultural heritage that humans may neglect at first glance. Our approach can be useful in a variety of applications related to cultural heritage such as semantics annotations, linked data, crowd-sensing, etc.