Iustinianus LOD

A Linked Open Data project exploring the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his cultural legacy across law, art, and history

EXPLORE THE PROJECT

PROJECT

This ontology-based project was developed for the Information Science and Cultural Heritage course at the University of Bologna, taught by Professor Francesca Tomasi and Professor Marilena Daquino.

It focuses on the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, collecting, analyzing, and semantically interlinking a curated set of cultural heritage items —including mosaics, buildings, historical documents, artifacts, audiovisual resources, and digital media—related to his reign and legacy.

Through Linked Open Data methodologies, the project constructs a dynamic knowledge graph, in which entities, drawn from diverse sources, are interconnected across disciplines and institutions. This not only enriches academic research but also ensures that Justinian’s multifaceted heritage — from the Corpus Iuris Civilis to the Hagia Sophia, from artistic representations to modern cultural reinterpretations — is preserved, accessible, and constantly recontextualized.

LOD are the foundation of the Semantic Web, an evolution of the traditional web that aims to make data understandable to machines as well. The goal is to transform the web into a network of semantically interconnected data.

To achieve this, the metadata provided by the institutions holding the selected items were transformed into semantic triples composed of a subject, a predicate, and an object. This is a key step in our project, and it is where RDF becomes essential. RDF is one of the fundamental technologies of the Semantic Web, used to structure and link data on the web. In addition to RDF, other technologies such as TEI/XML were used in the text analysis section.

STUDY OF THE DOMAIN

IDEA

"Cesare fui e son Iustiniano,
che, per voler del primo amor ch'i' sento,
d'entro le leggi trassi il troppo e 'l vano.
[...]
Tosto che con la Chiesa mossi i piedi,
a Dio per grazia piacque di spirarmi
l’alto lavoro, e tutto ‘n lui mi diedi;

e al mio Belisar commendai l’armi,
cui la destra del ciel fu sì congiunta,
che segno fu ch’i’ dovessi posarmi."

— Dante Alighieri, Paradiso VI

"Caesar I was, and am Justinian,
Who, by the will of primal Love I feel,
Took from the laws the useless and redundant.
[...]
As soon as with the Church I moved my feet,
God in his grace it pleased with this high task
To inspire me, and I gave me wholly to it,

And to my Belisarius I commended
The arms, to which was heaven's right hand so joined
It was a signal that I should repose."

— Dante Alighieri, Paradiso VI

The project stems from a collective reflection on the role of figures and monuments that serve as a junction between different cultural traditions.

Justinian I was chosen because, more than many other late antique rulers, he embodies the tension and encounter between East and West: from the legal reforms of the Corpus Iuris Civilis to grandiose architectural undertakings such as the Hagia Sophia, his political and symbolic action produced material and textual traces that cross borders and languages.

The popularity and resonance of Justinian’s image did not end with his lifetime. From Dante’s celebrated invocation in Paradiso to modern historiography, cinema, music and games, Justinian’s figure has been continuously reinterpreted. Contemporary media continue to reframe his achievements and controversies, showing how a sixth-century emperor still informs debates about law, empire, faith, and the interchange between East and West.

ITEMS

We conducted targeted research to identify ten key items directly connected to Justinian’s reign and later reception. The selection spans media and periods: mosaics and architecture, numismatics, manuscripts and legal codices, visual art, film and music, and contemporary games.

Sources combine institutional catalogues and museum collections (Catalogo Beni Culturali, Louvre, British Museum), digital archives and platforms (Internet Archive, YouTube, IMDb, BoardGameGeek), producing a compact dataset ready for semantic conversion and LOD analysis.

Mosaic from the Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna

Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna, a 6th-century Byzantine church, renowned for its mosaics including the iconic portrait of Emperor Justinian, exemplifying the union of political power and sacred art.

Mosaic 6th century

Diptych Barberini

6th century ivory diptych depicting the triumphant Emperor Justinian on horseback.

Ivory Diptych 525-550 A.D.

Procopius: History of the Wars

Loeb Classical Library edition (Greek text & English translation by H. B. Dewing). The book corresponds to Volume I, which contains Books I-II (The Persian War). This volume is also significant because it introduces for the first time the figure of Justinian I.

Book 1961

Codex Florentinus (part of Corpus Iuris Civilis)

Manuscript dating back to the 6th century which reports almost entirely the most relevant part of the Digest, that is, a part of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the collection of normative and jurisprudential material of Roman law commissioned by the emperor Justinian.

Manuscript 6th century

Coin

Gold Coin representing the bust of Justinian I. The obverse features a bust of Justinian, wearing a helmet and cuirass, facing forward, holding a spear and shield.
The reverse features an angel facing forward, holding a long cross and a cross on a globe (globus cruciger).

Coin 527-565 A.D.

Teodora, imperatrice di Bisanzio

This movie, also known as "Theodora, Slave Empress," tells the story of Teodora, a former courtesan who marries Emperor Justinian I and becomes the Empress of Byzantium. The film depicts her journey from her humble origins to the throne, where she displays great political acumen to save her husband's rule and deeply reform the state.

Movie 1954

Hagia Sophia

Historic architectural marvel in Istanbul, originally built as a Christian church and completed in 537 AD under the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I.

Historical Building 532-537 A.D.

Justinian Epic Symphony

A symphony that recounts the fundamental events that occurred under the empire of Justinian I.

Music 2023

Civilization (Videogame)

Videogame that offers a modern retelling of Justinian's reign, letting players rebuild the Byzantine Empire through lawmaking, diplomacy and large-scale military campaigns.

Videogame 2016

Justinian: Intrigue at the Emperor's Court (Board Game)

Board game in which players bribe influential courtiers to gain the emperor’s favor. Bribes come in four colors, but only three are scored during the game. At the end of each turn, one color is scored, and players earn points based on their followers’ influence at court.

Board Game 2006

KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION

Metadata Analysis

The first activity carried out by the team was the identification of the metadata standard adopted by the providers of the selected items, with the goal of ensuring interoperability. In cases where the institution had not explicitly stated the standard in use, the team decided to apply either the standard commonly adopted by similar institutions or the one deemed most suitable and relevant to the nature of the object, according to semantic accuracy and the context of usage of the formal grammar chosen.

Item	Object Type	Provider	Provided Metadata	Converted Metadata
San Vitale Mosaic	Mosaic - Photographic Heritage	Catalogo Generale Beni Culturali	Arco	ArCo
Diptych Barberini	Artwork	Musée du Louvre	/	CIDOC-CRM
Procopius: History of the Wars	Translated Edition - Digital Facsimile	Internet Archive	MARCXML	DCTERMS
Codex Florentinus	Manuscript Codex - Digital Facsimile	Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana	TEI/XML	DCTERMS
Coin with Justinian I	Coin	British Museum	MCEMS	NMO/DCTERMS
Teodora, imperatrice di Bisanzio	Movie	IMDb	/	Schema.org
Hagia Sophia	Historical Building - Architectural Record	Archnet	/	SCHEMA/DCTERMS
Justinian Epic Symphony (music)	Video	YouTube	/	Schema.org
Civilization (game)	Videogame	Civilization Fandom Wiki	/	SCHEMA/DCTERMS
Justinian: Intrigue at the Emperor's Court (game)	Game	Board Game	BoardGameGeek	SCHEMA/DCTERMS

Theoretical Model

The Theoretical Model was developed by analysing the natural language descriptions of each cultural heritage item, as provided by the holding institutions. The goal was to capture the core knowledge about Justinian’s legacy in a structured yet human readable form. All statements were expressed as subject–>predicate–>object triples, following the pattern of Linked Open Data. This made it possible to explicitly show not only how each item relates to the central theme, being the multifaceted heritage of Emperor Justinian I, but also the network of connections among the items themselves.

Because not every institution supplied metadata according to a formal standard, we carefully aligned each predicate to the most appropriate vocabulary. Where necessary, predicates were adapted to maintain readability and to ensure consistency with authority files. Additional entities—such as historical figures (Theodora, Belisarius), places (Constantinople, Ravenna), and concepts (Corpus Iuris Civilis, Byzantine architecture) were introduced to enrich the dataset and to reveal further links across the items.

In the visualisation, different colours and shapes serve to distinguish the types of information, and to make it easier to navigate the map. Items are represented with distinct shapes and colors, while entities are shown in rectangular white and green boxes. Entities with a literal and/or numeric nature are shown with oval shaped green boxes. A legend in the diagram explains the visual encoding in detail.

Theoretical model (click on image to enlarge)

Conceptual Model

The Conceptual Model formalises the domain knowledge by defining the classes, properties, and relationships that structure the dataset. Starting from the theoretical model, each natural language triple was elevated to an abstract level and assigned a suitable class or property from established ontologies. A custom base URI was created to uniquely identify the resources of the project: https://github.com/Iustinianus-LOD/Justinian-LOD/.

The selection of ontologies was driven by the nature of each item. For the Codex Florentinus and other bibliographic resources, the team adopted BIBFRAME, the standard for describing library materials. Museum objects—such as the Diptych Barberini, the San Vitale Mosaic, and the gold solidus—were modelled using CIDOC‑CRM, which offers the necessary granularity for cultural heritage artefacts. Schema.org and FOAF were employed for people, places, and organisations, ensuring interoperability with general purpose web applications. Nomisma.org ontologies provided the required specificity for the numismatic item (coin)

All classes and properties were selected on a case by case basis to guarantee semantic precision while preserving coherence across heterogeneous data sources. The resulting model thus reflects a careful balance between the richness of the original descriptions and the formal requirements of the Semantic Web.

Conceptual model (click on image to enlarge)

The full list of namespace prefixes used in our ontology includes:

@prefix just: <https://iustinianus-lod.github.io/Justinian-LOD//>
@prefix aat: <http://vocab.getty.edu/aat/>
@prefix bf: <http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/bibframe/>
@prefix bibo: <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/>
@prefix crm: <http://www.cidoc-crm.org/cidoc-crm/>
@prefix dbo: <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/>
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
@prefix nm: <http://nomisma.org/id/>
@prefix nmo: <http://nomisma.org/ontology#>
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#>
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
@prefix schema: <https://schema.org/>
@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>
@prefix wd: <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/>

KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

CSV FILES

Below is a collection of .csv files (one table per item) with the full natural-language description of our selected cultural heritage items.

The predicates were aligned to each source whenever possible; when not available, the mapping was completed by the team to balance precision and consistency for a later formal mapping.

Diptych

Mosaic

Codex

Coin

Movie

Building

Book

Music

Game

Board Game

Additional