Ontology Engineering to Model the European Cultural Heritage: The Case of Cultural Gems

TL;DR

The paper presents an ontology engineering effort to model European cultural heritage within Cultural gems, a JRC web platform crowdsourcing cultural locations across Europe. It details an ontology designed to align CG data with existing cultural heritage ontologies such as ArCo, Europeana, and CIDOC-CRM, using ontology design patterns (ODPs) and explicit mappings, with a top-level CulturalProperty hierarchy and a time-indexed location model. The data layer is populated via nightly ETL, resulting in about 2.9 million triples and enabling interlinking with DBpedia and GeoNames via LIMES, with plans for broader alignments. Access to the data is provided through the CELLAR SPARQL endpoint and REST services, and the data and ontology are supported by visualization tools (LODE, LodView, LodLive) to browse and explore the RDF graph. The work aims to improve interoperability, data quality, and enable new services for authorities and citizens, while fostering cross-domain collaboration in the EU cultural heritage ecosystem.

Abstract

Cultural gems is a web application conceived by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (DG JRC), which aims at engaging people and organisations across Europe to create a unique repository of cultural and creative places. The main goal is to provide a vision of European culture in order to strengthen a sense of identity within a single European cultural realm. Cultural gems maps more than 130,000 physical places in over 300 European cities and towns, and since 2020 it also lists online cultural initiatives. The new release aims, among other, to increase the interoperability of the application. At this purpose, we provide an overview on the current development of an ontology for Cultural gems used to map cultural heritage in European cities by using Linked Open Data (LOD) standards, and making the data FAIR, that is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. We provide an overview of the methodology, presenting the structure of the ontology, and the services and tools we are currently building on top.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Hierarchy of the main classes of the Cultural gems ontology.
• Figure 2: LodView visualization of the Museu do Fado gem.
• Figure 3: View of the relationships of the Museu do Fado gem to the other data entities using LodLive.