CIDOC CRM Ontology Research Articles

HBIM for conservation and valorization of structural heritage: The Stylite Tower at Umm ar-Rasas, Jordan

The Heritage Building Information Modeling (HBIM) is a consistent approach to support the multidisciplinary process of knowledge, conservation, and valorization of the historical building heritage, exploiting the combination of advanced 3D modelling and heterogeneous informative data. In the present paper, a highly customized HBIM workflow is developed for the enhancement and conservation of the byzantine Stylite Tower in the Jordan archaeological site of Umm ar-Rasas. The case study is considered a benchmark to test the effectiveness and the scalability of the proposed methodology for the broader set of ancient structures located in archaeological sites. The proposed HBIM process has a dual aim: the organization of heterogeneous and fragmented sources concerning the history and the actual state maintenance of the Tower and the development of a flexible tool to perform fast qualitative and quantitative analysis oriented towards conservation and management projects. The small scale of the structure and an innovative semi-automatic modelling process based on visual coding allowed for a stone-by-stone segmentation of the Tower. The model procedure is based on an information management workflow based on CIDOC-CRM ontology and the interchange format Industry Foundation Classes to ensure interoperability, developing an open-access interactive visualization of the model of the Tower, embedding organized document sources. The proposed HBIM model can also be a valuable tool for enhanced monument fruition and dissemination activities of the structure.

The Art of Memory: Archiving Street Art using the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model

This paper presents a detailed discussion of the data modelling and functional implementation of a semantically-enabled knowledge base related to the creation, digitisation and archiving of large-scale public art works. Based on principles of international best practice, standards and interoperability, the paper focuses on the use of the CIDOC-CRM ontology used in conjunction with the Arches Digital Cultural Heritage data management system to model street art-related entities and their semantic relationships. The work presented here is an extension of the work of the mementoArtem Digital Street Art Archive Project being carried out in conjunction with the INSYTE-Cooley Research Laboratory (I-CRL), South East Technological University (SETU), Waterford, Ireland.

Knowledge graph representation method for semantic 3D modeling of Chinese grottoes

The integration of 3D geometric models with semantic information significantly improves the applicability and comprehensibility of cultural heritage. The semantic 3D modeling of Chinese grottoes poses challenges for individuals without expertise in cultural heritage due to gaps in domain knowledge and discrepancies in understanding. However, the existing domain ontology and knowledge graph provide an insufficient representation of the knowledge of Chinese grottoes. To overcome these obstacles, we propose a knowledge graph representation method to provide explicit knowledge for participants at different stages of semantic 3D modeling of Chinese grottoes, which includes schema layer construction and data layer construction. On the schema layer, we design a domain ontology named ChgOnto (Chinese Grottoes Ontology) that consists of four high-level concept classes: spatial object, informational object, digital device, and temporal object. Among the classes in the ChgOnto, the components (e.g., cliff wall, cave roof, cliff wall footing), elements (e.g., primary Buddha statue, pedestal, decoration), the properties (e.g., length, width, depth) of caves and niches in Chinese grottoes as well as the spatial relationships between them are all precisely defined. ChgOnto also reuse the classes from the renowned CIDOC CRM ontology in the cultural heritage field and GeoSPARQL in the geospatial domain, facilitating integration between the two subjects. Considering the schema layer as the conceptual data model, the data layer extracts knowledge from unstructured text through natural language processing tools to instantiate the abstract classes and fill the properties of the schema layer. Finally, the knowledge required for semantic 3D modeling of Chinese grottoes is expressed in the data layer by a knowledge graph in a fixed expression form. Dazu Rock Carvings, a World Heritage site in China, is selected as a case study to validate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method. The results reveal that our method offers a robust knowledge-sharing platform for the semantic 3D modeling of Chinese grottoes and demonstrates excellent scalability. The method proposed in this paper can also serve as an informative reference for other types of cultural heritage.

Between Written and Visual Communication: CIDOC CRM Ontology for Medieval and Early Modern European Graffiti

The development of graffiti studies during the last couple of decades highlighted the relevance and potential of graffiti as a complementary source for understanding different aspects of past societies. Moreover, the availability of digital documentation techniques crucially increased data production, showing the widespread presence of graffiti in Medieval and Early Modern contexts across Europe. However, the approach to historical graffiti has not been yet structured. Guidelines, specific analytical tools, and descriptors are still missing due to various reasons. First, graffiti are a multiform and multimodal graphic expression, so texts, signs, and images must be considered together despite their different communicative nature. Secondly, due to their variety in forms and contents, graffiti have been studied from many perspectives (e.g., epigraphy, palaeography, history, art history, maritime studies), following the specific interests of each scholar. Consequently, the numerous and extensive contributions concerning graffiti highlight the lack of shared standards and approaches, hindering data analysis and interoperability. The panorama emerging is fragmentary and unstructured. This article thus aims to offer a first step toward the development of a specific methodology for the analysis and study of Medieval and Early Modern European graffiti. Precisely, a specific ontology adopting CIDOC CRM for Medieval and Early Modern graffiti will be presented, as developed in a preliminary form within the DIGIGRAF project 1 with the support of the ARIADNEplus 2 network.

A strategy for archives metadata representation on CIDOC-CRM and knowledge discovery

This paper presents a strategy for the semantic migration of Portuguese National Archives records into CIDOC-CRM standard, an ontology developed for museums, within the context of the EPISA project. The approach to automatically populate the CIDOC-CRM is based on Mapping Description Rules to semantically translate the archives descriptive information into CIDOC-CRM representation. The compliance of the CIDOC-CRM model recommendations guarantees that the populated CIDOC-CRM ontology of archives descriptive information verifies interoperability, and could be linked and integrated with other populated CIDOC-CRM ontologies. In the information modelling, requirements on the mapping representation, due to the intent of interpreting natural language text to automatically extract information of metadata text fields and to interpret natural language queries, are taken into account. To automatically interpret the Mapping Description Rules, OWL API was used to obtain the set of assertions that represents the information in the target ontology and two datasets are available with some migration examples. The exploration of the knowledge representation is done through some Description Logic queries to highlight the advantages of having this new representation of the National Archives. The evaluation of the resulting representation can be done automatically proving its correctness for the metadata that has a direct representation in CIDOC-CRM.

Linked Data for the Historic Environment

This article discusses the outcomes of research undertaken by the Hypermedia Research Group at the University of South Wales in collaboration with the OASIS team at the Archaeology Data Service in the Linked Data for the Historic Environment (LD4HE) project. The new OASIS system allows stakeholders to record information/events accurately and consistently, using established heritage and spatial vocabularies, including those currently available via the Heritage Data platform. The LD4HE project explores one avenue of enhancing the potential re-use of information recorded by OASIS and making connections with other online data collections. LD4HE enables the creation and export of RDF from the new OASIS V system, a major step towards the production of Linked Data. The main outcomes comprise a conceptual mapping between mandatory OASIS fields and the standard CIDOC-CRM ontology, together with a template-based tool to convert records exported from OASIS to a corresponding RDF representation. A set of SPARQL queries demonstrates the outcomes of the data conversion. New specialised vocabularies required by OASIS have been published as linked data on the Heritage Data platform. The methods are described and illustrated with examples. Reflections on the case study and cost/benefit considerations for Linked Data conversion are discussed, together with possible strategies for reducing the costs of producing Linked Data.

Increasing Access to Cultural Heritage Objects from Multiple Museums through Semantically-Aware Maps

Geographical information is gaining new momentum as an analysis and visualization tool for collections of cultural objects. It provides all kinds of users with new opportunities to contextualize and understand these objects in ways that resemble our ordinary spatially-located experience and to do so better than textual narratives. The SeMap project has built an online resource that shows more than 200,000 cultural objects through spatiotemporal maps, thus enabling new experiences and perspectives around these objects. Data come from the CER.ES repository and were created by a network of more than 100 Spanish museums. This article explains the refinement of the data provided by the repository, mostly by adding a semantic structure thanks to the CIDOC-CRM ontology, and by simplifying the exceedingly complex terminologies employed in the original records. Particular attention is paid to the methods for geolocating the information, as well as adding temporal filters (among others) to user queries. The functionalities, interface, and technical requirements are also explored at length.

CIDOC2VEC: Extracting Information from Atomized CIDOC-CRM Humanities Knowledge Graphs

The development of the field of digital humanities in recent years has led to the increased use of knowledge graphs within the community. Many digital humanities projects tend to model their data based on CIDOC-CRM ontology, which offers a wide array of classes appropriate for storing humanities and cultural heritage data. The CIDOC-CRM ontology model leads to a knowledge graph structure in which many entities are often linked to each other through chains of relations, which means that relevant information often lies many hops away from their entities. In this paper, we present a method based on graph walks and text processing to extract entity information and provide semantically relevant embeddings. In the process, we were able to generate similarity recommendations as well as explore their underlying data structure. This approach was then demonstrated on the Sphaera Dataset which was modeled according to the CIDOC-CRM data structure.

Representing and Validating Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs in CIDOC-CRM Ontology

In order to unify access to multiple heterogeneous sources of cultural heritage data, many datasets were mapped to the CIDOC-CRM ontology. CIDOC-CRM provides a formal structure and definitions for most cultural heritage concepts and their relationships. The COURAGE project includes historic data concerning people, organizations, cultural heritage collections, and collection items covering the period between 1950 and 1990. Therefore, CIDOC-CRM seemed the optimal choice for describing COURAGE entities, improving knowledge sharing, and facilitating the COURAGE dataset unification with other datasets. This paper introduces the results of translating the COURAGE dataset to CIDOC-CRM semantically. This mapping was implemented automatically according to predefined mapping rules. Several SPARQL queries were applied to validate the migration process manually. In addition, multiple SHACL shapes were conducted to validate the data and mapping models.

ARCHES DUNHUANG: HERITAGE INVENTORY SYSTEM FOR CONSERVATION OF GROTTO RESOURCES ON THE GANSU SECTION OF THE SILK ROAD IN CHINA

Abstract. The cultural heritage of the Buddhist grottoes on the Gansu section of the Silk Road in China has important historical, cultural and artistic values. In order to better protect these precious cultural sites including through facilitating ongoing assessment of their condition, the Dunhuang Academy has created a pilot inventory based on the Arches open-source software platform. This paper first briefly introduces the most important grottoes and the representative caves in Gansu province. It then, in view of the diversity of the grotto architecture layout, describes the Arches semantic graph data modelling technology and how the flexibility of Arches Designer was used to design the resource models, which not only meet data management needs, but also ensure data interoperability and longevity through incorporation of the CIDOC-CRM ontology. In addition, through design of the grottoes map plugin and resource components within Arches, the simple interaction and intuitive visualization of grottoes information was achieved. The Dunhuang Academy’s deployment of Arches will serve the need for grottoes data management and provide support for the establishment of a more scientific and effective protection and management system for the grottoes on the Silk Road in Gansu province. It is hoped that this project will demonstrate the suitability of the Arches platform to support the management of other grotto sites outside of Gansu province, as well as for heritage management elsewhere in China.

Ce qui est écrit et ce qui est parlé. CRMtex for modelling textual entities on the Semantic Web

This paper presents the new developments of CRMtex, an ontological model based on CIDOC CRM, created to describe ancient texts and other semiotic features appearing on inscriptions, papyri, manuscripts and other similar supports. The model is also designed to describe in a formal way the phenomena related to the production, use, conservation, study and interpretation of textual entities. CRMtex was originally intended to detect the close relationship linking ancient texts with the physical objects on which they are supported, the tools and writing systems used for their production, and the various scientific investigations and readings carried out on the text by modern scholars. It eventually evolved to provide researchers with the fundamental concepts for the correct and complete rendering of textual objects, the events representing their history and the cultural and social environments in and for which they were created. The full compatibility of CRMtex with the CIDOC CRM ontology and its extensions ensures persistent interoperability of data encoded by means of its entities with other semantic information produced in cultural heritage and digital humanities. The new entities presented in this paper deal more closely with textual and intertextual structures and try to deepen the close relationships existing between fragments of text or sequences of signs and the underlying meaning they were originally intended to convey.

A Tool to Explore the Population of a CIDOC-CRM Ontology

This paper presents a visualising tool to explore the population of an Ontology, obtained through the processes of automatic migration and text information extraction. It was developed in the context of EPISA project, a R&D project that aims to represent the Portuguese National Archives records information in CIDOC-CRM, an ontology developed for museums. The tool allows the migration process developers to visualise the instances and their properties, and to debug the migration process and the migration representation model, or to explore the Archives by final users. It uses modeling and reasoners OWL-API with SPARQL-DL queries to obtain the exploration results.

Ontologies and Technologies for Integrating and Accessing Digital Cultural Heritage: Lithuanian Approach

Web technologies are the key for the implementing and ensuring the full range of user needs in the digital age. On the other hand, the issue of unified representation of digital content from diverse memory institutions in order to ensure semantic integrity still remains a matter of urgency. Semantic interoperability of information and data is essential in an integrated system. In this paper, we analyze and describe an ontology-based metadata interoperability approach and how this approach could be applied for memory institution data from diverse sources which do not support ontologies. In particular, we describe the use of the CIDOC CRM ontology as a mediating schema within Lithuania’s Information System of the Virtual Electronic Heritage (hereinafter ”VEPIS”) The paper introduces the role of the CIDOC CRM based Thesaurus of Personal Names, Geographical Names and Historical Chronology (hereinafter “BAVIC”), which operates as a core ontology within VEPIS by allowing to understand things and relationships between things as well as identify the time and space of things. The paper also focuses on trust of the cultural information on the Web. Users make trust judgments based on provenance that may or may not be explicitly offered to them. In particular, we describe how provenance is managed within digital preservation and access processes within VEPIS and define whether this management meets the W3C Provenance Incubator Group’s Requirements for Provenance on the Web. The paper is based on the results of the research initiated in 2018–2019 at the Faculty of Communication and the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Vilnius University by authors of this paper.

FAIR data for prehistoric mining archaeology

This paper presents an approach how to create FAIR data for prehistoric mining archaeology, based on the CIDOC CRM ontology and semantic web standards. The interdisciplinary Research Centre HiMAT (History of mining activities in the Tyrol and adjacent areas, University of Innsbruck) investigates mining history from prehistoric to modern times with an interdisciplinary approach. One of the projects carried out at the research centre is the multinational DACH project “Prehistoric copper production in the eastern and central Alps”. For a specific geographical region of the project, the data transformation to open and re-usable data is investigated in a separate Open Research Data pilot project. The methodological approach will use the FAIR principles to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable. Every archaeological investigation in Austria has to be documented according to the requirements of the Austrian Federal Monuments Office. This documentation is deposited in the CERN-based EU supported research data repository ZENODO. For each deposited file, metadata are created through the application of the conceptual metadata schema CIDOC CRM, an ISO standard for Cultural Heritage Information, which was adopted by ARIADNE, the European Union Research Infrastructure for archaeological resources. Concepts specific to mining archaeology research are organized with the DARIAH Back Bone Thesaurus, a model for sustainable interoperable thesauri maintenance, developed in the European Union Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. Metadata are created through the extraction of information from the documentation and the transformation to a knowledge graph using semantic web standards. To facilitate usage, graph data are exported to hierarchical and tabular formats representing sites and objects with their geographic locations, temporal and typological assignments and links to the research activities and documents. Metadata are deposited together with the documentation into the repository.

Heritage Science and Cultural Heritage: standards and tools for establishing cross-domain data interoperability

This paper describes a system for documenting scientific data produced in Heritage Sciences. The system is built around a general meta-model, flexible enough to provide descriptions, in a formal language, of the datasets produced by scientific research. Resulting metadata can be re-encoded and published in multiple formats. The underlying metadata schema is inspired by CIDOC CRM principles for data modelling and maintains a full compatibility with CIDOC CRM ontology to capture provenance and foster interoperability with Cultural Heritage information. The use of a wide set of thesauri and controlled vocabularies guarantees internal coherence at data and metadata level. Applicability tests are underway at different institutions and a set of user interfaces has been designed to simplify and speed up the process of data gathering and metadata definition.

Using LIDO for Evolving Object Documentation into CIDOC CRM

Over the last years, many projects and institutions have worked on transforming object documentation from several existing cataloguing systems into a CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM) compliant graph representation, as expressed in RDF. There were also various attempts to provide a generally valid path for the transfer of data from Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO), CIDOC’s recommended XML Schema for metadata harvesting, into representations that are suitable for the Semantic Web. They all face the challenge that a detailed mapping, which fully exploits the CRM’s expressiveness and requires semantic assumptions that may not always turn out to be valid. Broad mappings, on the other hand, fail to leverage the potential of Semantic Web technologies. In this paper, we propose a method for using LIDO combined with an associated terminology as a means of evolving existing object documentation into CRM-based RDF representations. By clearly distinguishing between controlled vocabulary and ontology, it is possible to transform object data relatively easily into a minimized, though efficient structure using the CIDOC CRM ontology. This structure will open up the whole world of Semantic Web technologies to be used for further semantic refinement and data quality analysis through exploiting the underlying controlled vocabularies

Semantic National Biography of Finland

This paper presents the vision of publishing and utilizing textual biographies as Linked (Open) Data on the Semantic Web. As a case study, we publish the live stories of the National Biography of Finland, created by the Finnish Literature Society, as semantic, i.e., machine “understandable” metadata in a SPARQL endpoint using the Linked Data Finland (LDF.fi) service. On top of the data service various Digital Humanities applications are built. The applications include searching and studying individual personal histories as well as historical research of groups of persons using methods of prosopography. The biographical data is enriched by extracting events from unstructured and semi-structured texts, and by linking entities internally and to external data sources. A faceted semantic search engine is provided for filtering groups of people from the data for prosopographical research. An extension of the event-based CIDOC CRM ontology is used as the underlying data model, where lives are seen as chains of interlinked events populated from the data of the biographies and additional data sources, such as museum collections, library databases, and archives.

Information Integration in a Mining Landscape

The integration of information sources is a fundamental step to advance research and knowledge about the ancient mining landscape of Schwaz/Brixlegg in the Tyrol / Austria. The approach is applied for the localization, identification and interpretation of mining structures within the area. We want to show the use of the CIDOC CRM ontology with extensions in combination with a thesaurus to integrate data on a conceptual level. To implement this integration, we applied semantic web technologies to create a knowledge graph in RDF (Resource Description Framework) that currently represents the available information of seven different information sources in a network structure. More sources will be integrated using the same methodology. These are geochemical analysis of artefacts, onomastic research on names related to mining and archaeological information of other mining areas to research the spread of prehistoric mining activities and technologies.The RDF network can be queried for research, cultural or emergency response questions and the results can be displayed using Geoinformation systems. An exemplary archaeological research question is the location of mining, settlement and burial sites in the Bronze Age, differentiating between ore extraction, ore processing and smelting activities. For emergency forces the names and exact locations of mines are essential in case of an accident within an old mine. Different questions require a subset of the created knowledge graph. The results of queries to retrieve specific information can be visualised using appropriate tools.

DIGITAL WORKFLOWS FOR A 3D SEMANTIC REPRESENTATION OF AN ANCIENT MINING LANDSCAPE

Abstract. The ancient mining landscape of Schwaz/Brixlegg in the Tyrol, Austria witnessed mining from prehistoric times to modern times creating a first order cultural landscape when it comes to one of the most important inventions in human history: the production of metal. In 1991 a part of this landscape was lost due to an enormous landslide that reshaped part of the mountain. With our work we want to propose a digital workflow to create a 3D semantic representation of this ancient mining landscape with its mining structures to preserve it for posterity. First, we define a conceptual model to integrate the data. It is based on the CIDOC CRM ontology and CRMgeo for geometric data. To transform our information sources to a formal representation of the classes and properties of the ontology we applied semantic web technologies and created a knowledge graph in RDF (Resource Description Framework). Through the CRMgeo extension coordinate information of mining features can be integrated into the RDF graph and thus related to the detailed digital elevation model that may be visualized together with the mining structures using Geoinformation systems or 3D visualization tools. The RDF network of the triple store can be queried using the SPARQL query language. We created a snapshot of mining, settlement and burial sites in the Bronze Age. The results of the query were loaded into a Geoinformation system and a visualization of known bronze age sites related to mining, settlement and burial activities was created.

Un modello ontologico per l'integrazione delle informazioni del patrimonio culturale: CIDOC-CRM

The article aims at presenting the formal ontology CIDOC-Conceptual Reference Model, used for allowing information and documentation exchange and integration into the diverse sources of cultural heritage, and which is the leading ontology in the field since years. The ontology logical foundations are examined, entering into the details of the Description Logics, and also the theoretical configuration underlying the schema modelling. The relation (properties) structure - which is the ontology core - is presented along with the mechanisms proposed for the integration of cultural heritage information. In the end, this essays offers a brief and non-exhaustive overview of the information systems actually adopting the CIDOC-CRM ontology, from CLAROS to CulturaItalia.