Semantic Representation and Location Provenance of Cultural Heritage Information: the National Gallery Collection in London

Abstract

This paper describes a working example of semantically modelling cultural heritage information and data from the National Gallery collection in London. The paper discusses the process of semantically representing and enriching the available cultural heritage data, and reveals the challenges of semantically expressing interrelations and groupings among the physical items, the venue and the available digital resources. The paper also highlights the challenges in the creation of the conceptual model of the National Gallery as a Venue, which aims to i) describe and understand the correlation between the parts of a building and the whole; ii) to record and express the semantic relationships among the building components with the building as a whole; and iii) to be able to record the accurate location of objects within space and capture their provenance in terms of changes of location. The outcome of this research is the CrossCult venue ontology, a fully International Committee for Documentation Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM) compliant structure developed in the context of the CrossCult project. The proposed ontology attempts to model the spatial arrangements of the different types of cultural heritage venues considered in the project: from small museums to open air archaeological sites and whole cities.