Runes in Venice. Ontological description of the runic inscriptions on the Piraeus Lion (Venetian Arsenal)

The poster aims at showing an ontological description of three fragmentary runic inscriptions in Venice as part of the project “Il Leone del Pireo presso l’Arsenale di Venezia: un progetto digitale partecipativo” (P.I.: Prof. Marina Buzzoni, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), which focuses on the analysis and valorization of the three runic inscriptions (ca. 11th cent. AC) engraved on the statue of Piraeus Lion at the Venetian Arsenal and whose readability is increasingly deteriorating. After a 3D digitization of the statue, the texts of the inscriptions have been encoded according to TEI-EpiDoc XML standard, to eventually produce a scholarly digital edition of the corpus in compliance with the FAIR principles. As a further step, the encoding of metadata is also fundamental. An ontological approach and description will be helpful in overcoming the differences in likely-customized TEI schema (Murano et al. 2023) and at the same time, being detailed and rich in its semantics; this approach seems to be the most suitable solution. CRMtex 2.0 model is a reference ontology for describing ancient texts, specifically inscriptions, and their metadata: its ontological classes such as TX9 Glyph, TX5 Text Recognition, and TX14 Reading are relevant to the present case. In the poster, the ontological description of one of the inscriptions will be illustrated.