Chapter 1 Introduction
3.2 Ontology Standards and Cultural Heritage Classifica- tion Projectstion Projects
The problem of heterogeneity of concepts has led to the creation of several standards with the intention of standardizing and creating a basis for the development of ontologies for particular purposes. Although standards are a good starting point, they do not cover all the issues that may arise during the development of a project. In some cases the complexity of a standard may lead to only partial adoption of its proposal. In this Section we describe some popular standards in the Cultural Heritage domain.
3World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) - https://www.e-unwto.org/doi/abs/10.18111/
9789284404551
4https://info.datatourisme.gouv.fr/
5http://www.foaf-project.org/
6https://schema.org/
7http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/primer/
8https://dublincore.org/
24 Department of Computer Science The standardCIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM) [Doerr, 2005], is a tool recommended by ICOM (International Council of Museums), and since December 2006, it is recognized as an official ISO 21127:2014 standard. CIDOC CRM provides defi- nitions and structures, basic classes and relationships within the cultural heritage domain.
It has extensions that allow it to be adapted to different uses. One of these adaptations is CRM dig which is an ontology about the steps and methods on the production of digital material and 2D and 3D digital representations [Doerr and Theodoridou, 2014].
Some of the classes considered by CIDOC CRM are
❼ Temporal Entity: Events and states within a period of time.
❼ Place: Extensions of space and surface on the earth.
❼ Dimension: Quantifiable properties that can be measured by some means
❼ Persistent Item: Items that have a persistent identity (endurants). Contains the subclasses:
– Actor: Persons or Groups.
– Thing: Discrete and identifiable material things.
❼ Spacetime Volume: It can refer to a material phenomenon or an extension in space- time. It contains the subclasses:
– Physical Thing: Persistent items with a relatively stable shape, man-made or natural.
– Period: Phenomena or cultural manifestations that occur during time and space.
– Spacetime Snapshot: Arbitrary temporal extensions of a phenomenon within space-time. A portion within space-time.
Europeana Data Model Primer (EDM) [EDM, 2020] is an ontology that aims to standardize cultural heritage objects from different domains such as libraries, museums, audiovisual archives and others. It is not built on a particular standard but adopts a wide range of them, with the intention of being a Semantic Web framework between different domains.
Some classes considered by EDM are:
❼ Agent: Equivalent to CIDOC CRM Actor Class.
❼ Event: Equivalent to CIDOC CRM Period class.
❼ Information Resource: A resource whose essential characteristic can be communi- cated in a simple message, e.g., the text of a book, a musical score.
❼ Non-Information Resource: Resources that are not Information Resource, e.g., Peo- ple, Places.
❼ Physical Thing: Equivalent to CIDOC CRM Physical Thing.
❼ Place: Equivalent to CIDOC CRM Place.
❼ Provided Cultural Heritage Object (CHO): A superclass about cultural heritage objects.
❼ Time Span: Equivalent to CIDOC CRM Time-Span.
❼ Web Resource: Information resources with at least one web representation and a URI.
24 Universidad Cat´olica San Pablo
Finto [FINTO, 2020] is defined as a Finnish service for the publication and use of vocabularies, ontologies and classifications. Finto is sponsored by several Finnish govern- mental entities and is the continuation of the FinnOnto [SeCo, 2012] project, an ambitious project that is the basis for metadata, ontologies and linked data throughout Finland.
FinnOnto’s vision was to create a conceptual semantic infrastructure to interconnect pub- lic and private organizations for intelligent content exchange in the approach to the Se- mantic Web. Finto brings together ontologies from different domains, for our interest it includes the Ontology for the Domain of Museums and Applied Arts (MAO/TAO).
MAO/TAO has two superclasses, events and action and objects. Some of its basic concepts are listed below:
❼ events and actions: that can occur or happen, definite time but indefinite spaces.
– action: something that is done or accomplished.
✯ action with an object: action with an animated or non-animated object.
✯ independent action: action that do not require an object or more than one participant.
✯ mutual action: action between at least two participants.
– events: something done at a certain time and for a certain duration.
– periods of time: a time interval with a defined beginning and end.
– phenomena: a state or event with no defined beginning and end.
❼ objects: are entities that exist and have a certain defined space but undefined tem- poral limits.
– abstract objects: ideas that often take physical form, but the substance takes precedence over the physical manifestation.
– physical objects: animate or inanimate concrete objects with a mass.
✯ inanimate objects.
✯ matter.
✯ organic objects.
– physical whole: physical objects as a whole, where they are not primary func- tional entities.
– place: a portion of Earth or space.
✯ areas and regions.
✯ fictional places.
✯ places created by nature.
✯ places defined by humans.
– systems: functional entities that follow certain principles.
ICONCLASS [RKD, 2020] is a classification system developed by the Netherlands Institute for Art History, a hierarchical arrangement of definitions of objects, persons, events and abstract ideas that can be used for indexing, cataloguing and describing art- works involving images, such as paintings, reproductions, photographs and similar. The upper division of ICONCLASS contains ten topics, the first five of which are considered general topics, the remaining, special topics. Each division is divided into a maximum of nine subdivisions according to a logic of specificity. The first division is listed below:
26 Department of Computer Science
❼ Abstract, Non-representational Art
❼ Religion and Magic
❼ Nature
❼ Human being, Man in general
❼ Society, Civilization, Culture
❼ Abstract Ideas and Concepts
❼ History
❼ Bible
❼ Literature
❼ Classical Mythology and Ancient History
The Resource Description and Access (RDA)[RSC, 2020] standard is a set of el- ements, guidelines and instructions for the creation of metadata for library and cultural heritage resources according to international models, focused on linked data applications.
RDA was created as a replacement for the Anglo American Cataloguing Rules. RDA has had a mostly widespread application in the library domain. The use of RDA has a subscription cost.