Viewsari: Enabling New Perspectives on the Renaissance with a Knowledge Graph of Giorgio Vasari's The Lives
Abstract
In the digital humanities, semantic technologies have been recognized as providing the necessary bits and pieces to represent the complex and often ambiguous nature of humanities data. Despite this growing interest, a lack of practical frameworks for modeling the complex, usually multifaceted and multilingual, historical sources remains. In this paper, we present Viewsari, an ongoing Ph.D. project aiming to build a knowledge graph based on Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568), referred to as The Lives. This collection of biographies of important Renaissance artists, recounting tales of their lives and describing their artistic styles and works, is widely regarded as the first modern work of art history. With it, Vasari shaped the canon of the Italian Renaissance. The Viewsari project draws on knowledge extraction and aims to contextualize content from different editions of Vasari’s The Lives, addressing the challenges of working with complex, multilingual historical texts. Situated at the intersection of digital humanities and the Semantic Web, it demonstrates how modular, pattern-driven ontology development, leveraging Ontology Design Patterns and the eXtreme Design methodology, can support the structured representation and exploration of information across different editions and linguistic versions. The central goal is to generalize the Viewsari framework to match similar challenges, i.e., enriching and interconnecting textual sources in different domains.
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Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan 1 “He endowed him with the true moral philosophy and with the ornament of sweet poesy, so that the world might choose him and admire him as its highest exemplar in the life, works, saintliness of character, and every action of human creatures , and that he might be acclaimed by us as a being rather divine than human .” — The Life of Michelangelo Giorgio Vasari, 1568 ?
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan 2 “He endowed him with the true moral philosophy and with the ornament of sweet poesy, so that the world might choose him and admire him as its highest exemplar in the life, works, saintliness of character, and every action of human creatures , and that he might be acclaimed by us as a being rather divine than human .” — The Life of Michelangelo Giorgio Vasari, 1568
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan November 03, 2025 – Doctoral Consortium @ ISWC 2025, Nara, Japan Viewsari: Enabling New Perspectives on the Renaissance with a Knowledge Graph of Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives Sarah Rebecca Ondraszek¹² Supervisors: Dr. Jörg Waitelonis¹ and Prof. Dr. Harald Sack¹² Mastodon: sourisnumerique Mail: sarah-rebecca.ondraszek@fiz-karlsruhe.de ¹FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure, Germany ²Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), Germany
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Vasari’s The Lives (as a use case) 4
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574): Italian painter, architect, and writer. ●Played a significant role in shaping the concept of the Italian Renaissance. 5 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects ●The reference work for Renaissance research. ●Le vite de' piu eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori. ●Publication date: 1550, expanded in 1568. ●Biographical descriptions of prominent Renaissance artists. Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574): Italian painter, architect, and writer. ●Played a significant role in shaping the concept of the Italian Renaissance. 6 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects ●The reference work for Renaissance research. ●Le vite de' piu eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori. ●Publication date: 1550, expanded in 1568. ●Biographical descriptions of prominent Renaissance artists. Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574): Italian painter, architect, and writer. ●Played a significant role in shaping the concept of the Italian Renaissance. 7 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects ●The reference work for Renaissance research. ●Le vite de' piu eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori. ●Publication date: 1550, expanded in 1568. ●Biographical descriptions of prominent Renaissance artists. Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan ●Rich dataset: English version references ~1,000 persons, further unknown number of (implicit) artworks and other entities, typed relations (commissions, e.g. from the Medici family), etc. ●Exemplifies key challenges in the application of computational methods in digital humanities, cultural heritage. Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives 8
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Challenges in Viewsari 9
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Viewsari – a multifold framework Pattern-based development (eXtreme Design, Ontology Design Patterns). Provenance tracking of extracted content. Three core modules: bibliographic, structural, content. 16
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan LLM-based entity extraction (persons, artworks, motifs, places). Handles implicit references and OOKB entities. Viewsari – a multifold framework 17
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan KG based on extracted entities, plus information on bibliographic and structure-related details. Viewsari – a multifold framework 18
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Viewsari and ObliquER 19
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan ●ObliquER combines entity recognition and entity linking. ○Focus on explicit named entities and implicit references in historical texts. ○Evaluation/generalization: Tested on additional art historical datasets to assess cross-domain generalizability for tasks involving implicit reference extraction and entity linking. Aspects of ObliquER 20
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Preliminary results, work in progress 21
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Viewsari ontology v1.0: ●Three modules: bibliographic, structural, content. ●Built on: PROV-O, FaBiO, FRBR, Web Annotation Ontology. ●Key feature: Paragraph-level provenance for extracted knowledge, linking it back to different versions of the text. ●Validation: Competency questions + iterative domain expert review. Preliminary results & WIP 22
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Entity recognition (UniversalNER, FLAIR): ●Example ground truth: 133 artworks, 311 subjects. Preliminary results & WIP Precision Recall F1 UniNER-7B-all (Artworks) 54.862 (±5.76) 56.532 (±4.79) 55.606 (±4.79) UniNER-7B-all (Subjects) 78.885 (±3,68) 48.748 (±2,63) 60.242 (±2,86) Results from NER iteration using UniNER for artwork and subject recognition: https://github.com/ISE-FIZKarlsruhe/vasari_nlp/ sculpture of Duke Lorenzo WORK tomb of M. Raffaello Maffei WORK Above the heads of the terminal figures, which form capitals, are architrave, frieze, and cornice, which project beyond those figures and are carved with rich ornaments, foliage, ovoli, dentils, and other rich members, distributed over the whole work. WORK PER 23
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, JapanSarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Preliminary results & WIP– Viewsari KG v1.0 24
Sarah Ondraszek, Viewsari, DC@ISWC 2025, November 03, 2025, Nara, Japan Limitations 25