Knowledge-Based Framework for the Virtual Communication of Public Art

This paper deals with the documentation and communication of contemporary public art. It analyzes the specific requirements of such a form of cultural heritage and presents a system that implements the visualization of implicit information in a web -- based virtual reality environment. The core of the system is a knowledge -- based (ontological) module, devised to represent the values, the realization procedures, and the access ways to public art items. The visualization system relies upon the ontological representation to provide a 3D layout that takes into account the relevant traits that characterize the contemporary public art. The issues of integration of the public art within the urban context is the object of a visualization component, implemented in interactive web -- based 3D graphics, that relies on the ontological knowledge concerning the public art, integrated with additional ontological descriptions of spatial geographic knowledge.