Ontologies for Cultural Heritage

In the cultural heritage domain information systems are increasingly deployed, digital representations of physical objects are produced in immense numbers and there is a strong political pressure on memory institutions to make their holdings accessible to the public in digital form. The sector splits into a set of disciplines with highly specialized fields. Due to the resulting diversity, one can hardly speak about a “domain” in the sense of “domain ontologies” [33]. On the other side, study and research of the past is highly interdisciplinary. Characteristically, archaeology employs a series of “auxiliary” disciplines, such as archaeometry, archaeomedicine, archaeobotany, archaeometallurgy, archaeoastronomy, etc., but also historical sources and social theories. Interoperability between various highly specialized systems, integrated information access and information integration increasingly becomes a demand to support research, professional heritage administration, preservation, public curiosity and education. Therefore the sector is characterized by a complex schema integration problem of associating complementary information from various dedicated systems, which can be efficiently addressed by formal ontologies [14,32,33]. There is a proliferation of specialized terminology, but terminology is less used as a means of agreement between experts than as an intellectual tool for hypothesis building based on discriminating phenomena. Automated classification is a long established discipline of archaeology, but few terminological systems are widely accepted. The sector is, however, more focused on establishing knowledge about facts and context in the past than about classes of things and the laws of their behavior. Respectively, the concatenation of related facts by co-reference [56] to particulars, such as things, people, places, periods is a major open issue. Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS, [62]) describing people and places are employed to a certain degree, and pose similar technical problems as ontologies, but the required scale is very large. In this chapter, we describe how ontologies are and could be employed to improve information management in the cultural heritage sector.