“Vibes Lore Core” wins the Best Resource Paper Award at ISWC 2026

The paper “Vibes Lore Core: the Aesthetics Knowledge Graph” won the Best Resource Paper Award at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2026. ISWC is one of the leading international conferences on the Semantic Web and knowledge graphs, and its 25th edition took place in Bari, Italy, from 25 to 29 October.

The paper presents a knowledge graph describing 1,031 cultural aesthetics, such as Steampunk and Frutiger Aero. These are universes of style and meaning that bring together images, objects, sounds and values, and they also shape how content is discovered on digital platforms. Aesthetics often rest on abstract concepts and tacit knowledge. The resource makes them explicit through an ontology available in five languages, which describes the relationships between aesthetics, their recurring motifs, historical periods and cultural figures. It can be used both to study digital culture and to develop recommender systems.

The paper acknowledges CESSDA. Two CNR-ISTC researchers, Silvia Cappa and Anna Sofia Lippolis, whose contracts are funded by CESSDA/DASSI, made an essential contribution, together with Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese, a member of the DASSI team.

For DASSI, this result matters because it shows how digital social and cultural phenomena can be described through structured, linkable and reusable data. It is a concrete example of how semantic technologies can expand the analytical tools available to social research, in line with the infrastructure’s commitment to making data valuable and reusable.

The paper is available in the conference proceedings:

Cappa, S. et al. (2027). Vibes Lore Core: the Aesthetics Knowledge Graph. In: Koubarakis, M., et al. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2026. ISWC 2026. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 17127. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-42026-8_33