Assassin's CHreed
a LODLAM project.
Assassin's Creed II is a critically acclaimed action-adventure game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and released in 2009. The game is set in Renaissance-era Italy and follows the story of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a young nobleman turned assassin, as he seeks revenge against those who have wronged his family.
Known for its immersive open-world environment, engaging storyline, and deep character development, the game cemented its place as one of the most popular and influential video games of all time, also thanks to the wide range of faithful depictions of cultural heritage items that permeate its whole narrative. In the game, the players are free to explore meticulous recreations of real-world locations such as the cities of Florence, Venice, and Rome, each of which is filled with accurate portrayals of historic landmarks and buildings, as well as a number of smaller towns and villages. The game also features a number of famous artworks, many of which can be found in the virtual galleries of the game's various palaces and museums, as well as many other lesser-known cultural heritage items, such as weapons and traditional dresses.
With such an extended quantity of cultural objects in it, the game presented itself as a perfect candidate for this Linked Open Data project, which aims to make use of LOD tools to describe in an interoperable and semantically meaningful way for 10 of these objects.
The painting evokes an episode linked to the anti-Medicean conspiracy at the hands of the dei Pazzi family in 1478: the discovery of the corpse of Jacopo, one of the figures at the forefront of the conspiracy, by an agitated crowd; with the city walls in the background and beyond them, the green Florentine hills.
Go to the itemThe Assassin's Creed II soundtrack is a collection of music tracks composed by Danish composer Jesper Kyd that were used as background music in Assassin's Creed II.
Go to the itemThe Codex Atlanticus is a 12-volume, bound set of drawings and writings by Leonardo da Vinci. It comprises 1,119 leaves dating from 1478 to 1519, the contents covering a great variety of subjects, from flight to weaponry to musical instruments and from mathematics to botany. The drawing we selected shows the design for a mechanical wing activated with a special device. A digitalized rendition based on this sketch can be found in the videogame.
Go to the itemAssassin's Creed: Lineage is a series of three short films based on the universe of the video game Assassin's Creed, and were created by Ubisoft. Created as a bridge for Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed II, the film details the time of Giovanni Auditore da Firenze as an Assassin for the Medici, and how he uncovered a conspiracy that threatened the power of the ruling body in Florence.
Go to the itemGamePro was originally launched as an American online and print content video game magazine. The magazine featured content on various video game consoles, PC computers and mobile devices. The cover of its 252nd issue features the protagonist of the game Assassin's Creed II, Ezio Auditore. This issue also contains a creative insert advertisement for the game.
Go to the itemFalchion refers to a type of curved sword that was used in Europe from about 1200. This is one of the few to survive from the late fifteenth century. Its long narrow blade and interlaced decoration on the hilt suggest the Middle Eastern influence that was an important feature in Venetian and Spanish art. In the game Assassin's Creed II, the digitized vendition of Venetian Falchion is a weapon that players can obtain and use.
Go to the itemThe Palazzo Vecchio is the town hall of Florence, Italy. It overlooks the Piazza della Signoria, which holds a copy of Michelangelo's David statue, and the gallery of statues in the adjacent Loggia dei Lanzi. In the game Assassin's Creed II, a digitized rendition of this building is located in the city center of the game’s version of Florence.
Go to the itemPerseus with the Head of Medusa is a bronze sculpture made by Benvenuto Cellini in the period 1545–1554. The sculpture stands on a square base that has bronze relief panels depicting the story of Perseus and Andromeda, similar to a predella on an altarpiece. In the game Assassin's Creed II, a digitized rendition of this sculpture can be found nearby the Palazzo Vecchio.
Go to the item"Assassin's Creed: Renaissance" is a novel written by Oliver Bowden based on the game Assassin's Creed II. Despite being a textual version of Assassin's Creed II, there were several differences present in the novel, as well as things added into the book that were not included in the game.
Go to the itemThe physical copy of the game Assassin's Creed II was released in November 2009 and playable on the console Xbox 360.
Go to the itemThe first step was to model our main topic and the 10 items we have chosen to represent the domain of study into a conceptual map, using natural language to create relations between each item and some of the most relevant descriptive characteristi cs we extracted from them, answering the questions of who, what, when and where.
We then translated the conceptual map into a more formal E/R model, abstracting the data and relationships from the previous map into more universal-fitting ones in order to graphically represent our domain employing a more general perspective.
We moved further in our modeling effort by adding a new layer, that of data interpretation. This theoretical model is expressed in natural language and provides additional and more detailed information about the items, offering a more comprehensive understanding of the entities associated with the central topic.
Consequently, we also updated the original E/R model on the basis of the new theoretical model, enhancing its descriptive and informative capabilities by adding the new entities and relationships.
We then finally moved from the previously shown theoretical model to a more formal representation of our data, adopting an ontological approach. In this way, we constructed a conceptual model that incorporates established schemas and vocabularies to accurately portray our scenario in a cohesive manner.
With our modeling phase concluded, we revisited the items to depict them on the basis of the conceptual model that was developed. Each item is described in a statement codified in the form of a semantic triple, each row in the following table depicting a subject-predicate-object. The subjects and objects are expressed in natural language, whereas the predicates are conveyed through the ontologies identified in the preceding step.
The description of each of the items are stored in CSV files, downloadable by clicking on the icon on the upper left cell of each table.
The subsequent phase involved converting the previously-shown statements into RDF format, in our case using the Turtle syntax. Prior to composing the statements, we compiled a list of all the prefixes that we intended to use, and we then minted a set of URIs to identify the primary entities within the domain. We also employed owl:sameas to establish links between certain elements of the project and corresponding authority records, such as VIAF and GeoNames.
We used Felix Lohmeier's Turtle Web Editor to validate our Turtle file in conjunction with Anton Vasetenkov's Turtle Editor to count our total triples, which amounted to a total of 81 triples.
In our RDF production, we decided to expand some of the items by using other authority control, which is GettyAAT, to describe some of the items such as drawing techniques, etc.
We minted the following URIs:
Lastly, we visualized the RDF serialization using RDF Grapher.
