Cultural Semantics of Sacred Writing
Integrating Descriptive Terminology into the Ukrainian SKOS for Religious Epigraphy
Abstract
This paper explores how cultural and epistemological factors shape the descriptive terminology of sacred inscriptions and how these can be formalized within a digital vocabulary. Drawing on ongoing doctoral research devoted to the development of a SKOS-based classification for Ukrainian epigraphy, it focuses on how culturally specific categories—графіті, напис, надпис, молитва, комеморація, вотивний напис—encode religious meaning, ritual context, and spatial associations.
Rather than adopting externally imposed typologies such as “funerary” or “dedicatory,” the Ukrainian SKOS vocabulary reconstructs the indigenous structure of scholarly discourse and devotional practice. Corpus analysis of academic and field publications reveals that terms used to describe inscriptions are deeply embedded in the local conceptualization of the sacred, where language, ritual, and memory form an indivisible whole. The hierarchy therefore reflects not only linguistic usage but also the epistemic and theological logic of Eastern Christian culture.
The paper argues that descriptive terminology is itself a form of cultural heritage—an interpretive layer through which communities have historically understood their sacred spaces and written acts. Encoding this terminology through SKOS transforms it into a durable, interoperable component of digital heritage infrastructures while safeguarding its cultural specificity.
By foregrounding the cultural semantics of sacred writing, this work demonstrates how digital modeling can preserve not only the inscriptions themselves but also the conceptual worlds that gave them meaning.