Visual metaphors for semantic cultural heritage

During the last decade, cultural heritage has moved toward the encoding of information in semantic format. Ontolo- gies make the description of artworks clearer, unambiguous and often self-explanatory, with advantages in terms of interoper- ability. 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.