Abstract
Abstract. The Statements of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) concerns the core justification for nominating and inscribing cultural and natural heritage properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, ever since 2007. Ten criteria are specified and measured independently for the selection process. The 2008 ICOMOS Report “What is OUV” has been a successful example to interpret OUV as an integral concept by inspecting the associations of the selection criteria in all inscribed properties. This paper presents a novel methodology for interpreting OUV using computational techniques of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Graph Visualization. Firstly, frequent phrases appearing in Statements of OUV are used to construct a lexicon for each selection criterion; Secondly, three similarity matrices are constructed as graphs to represent the pair-wise associations of the criteria; Lastly, the lexicon and graphs are visualized in 2D. The study shows that the lexicon derived from computational techniques can capture the essential concepts of OUV, and that the selection criteria are consistently associated with each other in different similarity metrics. This study provides a quantitative and qualitative interpretation of the Statements of OUV and the associations of selection criteria, which can be seen as an elaborated computational extension of the 2008 Report, useful for future inscription and evaluation process of World Heritage nominations.
Highlights
The World Heritage Convention seeks to preserve the “parts of the cultural and natural heritage ... of outstanding interest ... [for] mankind as a whole” since its adoption in 1972 (UNESCO, 1972)
This paper presents a computational analysis of the selection criteria justified in Statements of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) on their semantic meanings and intrinsic associations
Considering all the properties inscribed in the World Heritage (WH) List, a cooccurrence matrix of the selection criteria was constructed as A = [Ak,l]κ×κ, k, l ∈ [0, κ), κ = 10, where the off-diagonal entries Ak,l, k = l are the number of properties that satisfy both criteria k and l, and the diagonal entries Ak,k record the number of cases when each criterion k is used alone
Summary
The World Heritage Convention seeks to preserve the “parts of the cultural and natural heritage ... of outstanding interest ... [for] mankind as a whole” since its adoption in 1972 (UNESCO, 1972). After the adoption of the Operational Guidelines in 2005, the justification of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) has become an administrative requirement, instead of an independent qualification since 1977, for inscribing any new WH nomination (UNESCO, 2008, Jokilehto, 2008). Ten selection criteria exist as the core of OUV, among which criteria (i) - (vi) generally refer to cultural values, and (vii) - (x) to natural ones. Retrospective Statements of OUV were prepared during the Second Cycle of Periodic Reporting (20082015) by 812 properties inscribed before 2006, to revise or refill the section of justification for criteria if it was incomplete or not agreed on at the time of inscription (IUCN et al, 2010)
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