Digital Documentation of the Rupe Magna: A FAIR Data Framework and a Portable RTI Dome

This thesis presents a comprehensive framework for the documentation and analysis of rock art through Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), combining technical innovation, methodological rigour, and semantic data representation. The research was developed and validated in the field at the Rupe Magna site (Valtellina, Italy), with the aim of producing reproducible, interoperable, and open documentation of engraved surfaces. The underlying RTI acquisition and processing data are available in the companion dataset: "Rupe Magna — Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) Datasets for Digital Documentation (RAW, PTM, and Processed Images)". Three main contributions are presented.

First, a portable and low-cost RTI dome was designed and constructed to enable accurate and consistent image acquisition in outdoor conditions, overcoming the limitations of highlight-based methods. Second, a comparative evaluation of RTI visualisation software established a structured benchmark for analysing usability, analytical potential, and compatibility across platforms. Third, the application of the workflow to the Rupe Magna engravings demonstrated the effectiveness of RTI in enhancing the legibility of eroded figures and supporting detailed archaeological interpretation.

To ensure that the knowledge generated through these processes is transparent and reusable, the thesis also integrates Semantic Web technologies, employing RDF to represent the data as an interconnected graph of entities and relationships. This semantic approach, implemented through an extension of the ArCo ontology, models the RTI survey, equipment, and photographic documentation within a coherent conceptual structure. This layer complements the technical and analytical work by making the RTI workflow itself machine-readable, interoperable, and aligned with the principles of the London Charter, FAIR data, and the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). By uniting hardware design, software analysis, field experimentation, and semantic modelling, this thesis advances a reproducible, open, and conceptually integrated approach to digital archaeological documentation.