Dura-Europos Stories: Developing interactive storytelling applications using knowledge graphs for cultural heritage exploration

Abstract

We introduce Dura-Europos Stories, a multimedia application for viewing artifacts and places related to the Dura-Europos archaeological excavation. We describe the process of mapping data to the Wikidata data model as well as the process of contributing data to Wikidata. We provide an overview of the functionality of an interactive application for viewing images of the artifacts in the context of their metadata. We contextualize this project as an example of using knowledge graphs in research projects in order to leverage technologies of the Semantic Web in such a way that data related to the project can be easily combined with other data on the web. Presenting artifacts in this story-based application allows users to explore these objects visually, and provides pathways for further exploration of related information.