=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2050/shapes-paper2
|storemode=property
|title=The Shape of a Benedictine Monastery: The SaintGall Ontology
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2050/SHAPES_paper_2.pdf
|volume=Vol-2050
|authors=Claudia Cantale,Domenico Cantone,Manuela Lupica Rinato,Marianna Nicolosi-Asmundo,Daniele Francesco Santamaria
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/jowo/CantaleCRAS17
}}
==The Shape of a Benedictine Monastery: The SaintGall Ontology==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2050/SHAPES_paper_2.pdf
The Shape of a Benedictine Monastery:
The SaintGall Ontology
Claudia Cantale, a Domenico Cantone, b Manuela Lupica Rinato, c
Marianna Nicolosi-Asmundo, b and Daniele Francesco Santamaria b
a Dept. of Humanities, University of Catania, Italy
b Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, Italy
c Officine Culturali, Catania, Italy
Abstract. We present an OWL 2 ontology representing the Saint Gall plan, one of
the most ancient documents arrived intact to us, which describes the ideal model of
a Benedictine monastic complex that inspired the design of many European monas-
teries.
Keywords. Ontology, OWL 2, Digital Humanities, Benedictine Monasteries.
1. Introduction
Monasteries are conceived by the Benedictine monastic order, founded by Saint Benedict
of Nursia, during the last period of the Western Roman Empire. The monastic shape aims
preserving the European Christianity inside small self-sustaining communities where to
lead a life of mystic and religious contemplation and introspection.1 The main principle
is to protect and shield Christian religion and tradition from barbarian invasions.
Starting from the VII century, Western Europe is characterized by a capillary net-
work of monasteries. Their shape in Occident remained largely unchanged in its charac-
teristics during the whole Middle Age and in all Christian countries.
Monasteries are often also abbeys that are spaces where the nullius diocesis is ef-
fective. Such norm, in the canon law, represents the independence of a church and of the
related monastery from the diocese in which the building is located. Therefore, the abbot
substitutes for the bishop inside the Benedictine “village”.
Strongly inspired by the rule of Saint Benedict, the plan of St. Gall, illustrated in Fig-
ure 1, is a model of monastery better representing the Benedictine architecture.2 Founded
in the context of Pre-Romanesque Carolingian art and architecture, in which a varied
partition of the space is preferred, it can be considered a fixed-type for the Middle Age
monasteries [9]. Moreover, being one of the most ancient descriptions of primitive Bene-
1 «Monasticism has its root in the interpretation of the Christian faith developed in the theology of the VI
century firstly in Orient. Analogously to theology and architecture, it is subjected to a deep transformation
in Occident. [ ... ] The Benedictine Order remains for a long time the principal one. Hundreds of convents
and monasteries are spread across the Christian Europe and represent cells of Christian tradition and faith, of
science, and of culture» [10].
2 http://www.stgallplan.org/
Figure 1. The plan of Saint Gall.
dictine monastery arrived intact today, it turns out to be an important structural, archi-
tectonic, and functional landmark for the Benedictine monasteries. In the plan, St. Gall
monastery is idealized together with its essential components. In fact, as it often hap-
pens in the context of architectural history, buildings realized in a long temporal window
are subject to change with respect to the original idea because of historical, economical,
practical, and morphological reasons. Many European monasteries are inspired by the
St. Gall plan even if for practical and technical reasons they deviate from it. For instance,
Catania’s Benedictine Monastery [1,8] contains most of the elements of the St. Gall plan
with the exception of some locations such as the brewery that, for cultural reasons, is re-
placed by a distillery. Moreover, Catania’s Benedictine Monastery is a urban monastery
and therefore the structure of the animal farms is also slightly modified.
In this paper we present an OWL 2 ontology, called SaintGall Ontology, representing
the monastery described in the St. Gall plan. SaintGall Ontology has been developed
by taking into account structural, architectonic, and functional details of the buildings
included in the plan, and information provided by [9,10,11,12]. It consists of more than
400 classes, almost 60 object properties, and more than 1000 logical axioms. It exploits
OWL 2 constructs such as existential restriction and qualified cardinality restriction, and
has been classified using the Fact++ reasoner.
2. The Ontology of St. Gall plan
The SaintGall Ontology3 describes buildings and green spaces depicted in the Saint Gall
plan considering their cardinal orientation, their position with respect to other entities
inside the plan, and their architectonic, structural, and functional features.
The ontology exploits the following main classes. The class Building describes a
generic building, Garden specifies a generic green space, Element describes architec-
tural, natural, ornamental, and votive elements, furnitures and tools of common use illus-
trated in the plan. The ontology also provides classes and properties to describe the car-
3 https://goo.gl/XN2hc3
Figure 2. Description of NorthArea.
dinal orientation, position, and shape of the structures of the plan, and the role of people
living inside the monastery.
At first we model the functional areas of the monastery classifying the buildings
represented on the map according to their intended use. Specifically, we introduce
as subclasses of Building the pairwise disjoint classes BuildingForEducation,
BuildingForHospitality, BuildingForTheSickAndInfirm, FarmBuilding,
PrincipalMonasticBuilding.
BuildingForEducation includes, in particular, the class School, modeling
a building intended for the education of scholars, and the class NoviceCloister,
representing the novice cloister, dwelling of young people oriented to the
monastic life. BuildingForHospitality contains among others the class
HospitiumDistingueshedGuests, modeling the hospitium for the reception of em-
inent strangers, and the class HospitiumPoorTravelersPilgrims, representing the
dwelling of poor travelers and pilgrims. The class BuildingForTheSickAndInfirm
contains in particular the subclass InfirmaryCloister, representing the cloister
where the sick brethren are lodged, and the class DoctorHouse, containing among
others a private room for the physician and a room for very ill patients. The class
FarmBuilding models the factory, the working house, and other buildings devoted to
domestic cattle, poultry, and their keepers. The class PrincipalMonasticBuilding
includes in particular the classes AbbotHouse, modeling the dwelling of the abbot,
TheCloister, describing the cloister where monks live, and TheChurch, describing
the abbey. The hierarchy of Building subclasses is shown in [2].
The green spaces inside the monastery are modeled by means of the
class Garden, having the disjoint subclasses Cemetery, KitchenGarden, and
PhysicGarden. Cardinal orientation of buildings and gardens on the map are
modeled by the classes CardinalDirection, CentralPosition, and the object-
property hasPosition, having as range the union of CardinalDirection and
CentralPosition. CardinalDirection is a finite enumeration of the values
East, North, NorthEast, NorthWest, South, SouthEast, SouthWest, West.
CentralPosition contains only the individual Centre. In addition, we intro-
duced the defined classes CentralArea, EastArea, NorthArea, NorthEastArea,
NorthWestArea, WestArea, SouthEastArea, SouthWestArea, SouthArea, whose
subclasses, representing the buildings and gardens of the monastery, are deduced by in-
ference. Figure 2 and 3 show the description and the inferred hierarchy of NorthArea,
respectively.
Figure 3. Inferred hierarchy of NorthArea.
Figure 4. Subclass hierarchy of Shape.
In addition, we define the position of buildings or gardens in the map with respect to
other contiguous buildings or gardens, by means of object-properties such as onEastOf,
onNorthEastOf, onNorthOf, onNorthWestOf, etc., where onEastOf is the inverse of
onWestOf, onNorthOf of onSouthOf, and so on.
Next we analyze the shape, the size, and the internal structure of buildings and gar-
dens. We define the class Shape, modeling the shape of structures and whose subclass
hierarchy is shown in Figure 4, and the object-property hasShape. The class Size and
the object-property hasSize model the size of buildings.
The class Element has as subclasses the class ArchitecturalElement, describing
general architectural elements inside the map, the class Forniture, modeling objects
used in everyday life such as Bedstand and Desk, the class Tool, modeling tools of
common use such as Furnace and Boiler, and classes describing rooms, clothes, food,
votive and ornamental elements.
In addition, we provide the object-properties contains, together with its subprop-
erties consistOf, containsAround, and so on, and its inverse isContainedIn, to-
gether with its subproperties isPartOf, isContainedAround, and so on. The whole
hierarchy of subclasses of Element and of their related properties is illustrated in [2].
In Figure 5 we show our representation of the abbot house. This building, inhabited
by the abbot, is surrounded by a fence. It consists of two stories of which the lower one
has an open portico on the east and west sides. The inner space is split into two chambers:
the abbot sleeping and sitting rooms. The upper story contains some small chambers
and one large chamber. Details concerning the furniture of the abbot sleeping and sitting
rooms are modeled by the classes AbbotSleepingRoom and AbbotSittingRoom, re-
spectively, which are both subclasses of Chamber. Our representation of the monk clois-
ter can be found in [2].
We also modeled people living in the monastery. As shown in Figure 6, they are
classified according to the place in which they live and spend most of the day.
Figure 5. Description of AbbotHouse.
Figure 6. Description of Abbot.
3. Conclusions
We presented an ontology for the Saint Gall plan, that describes the ideal model of the
structure of a monastic Benedictine building. The plan allows one to study the most sig-
nificant features of European monastic buildings such as the Monastery of San Nicolò
l’Arena in Catania, the Abbey of Santa Giustina in Padua, the Cluny Abbey, the Mon-
tecassino Abbey [9]. By means of SaintGall Ontology, scholars and researchers in Hu-
man Science can effectively compare several distinct monastic architectures and, from
their differences and similarities, make inferences not only in architectonic and stylistic
ambits, but also in interpretative and theological areas [11].
We are currently considering the integration of the SaintGall Ontology with the on-
tology for the Benedictine Monastery of Catania presented in [3] and other widespread
ontologies for cultural heritage such as as CIDOC-CRM.4 Some generic classes from
the SaintGall Ontology, such as Church and Cloister, can be reused to design novel
ontologies describing buildings outside the Benedectine context. Consider, for instance,
the architectonic structure of closed garden (cloister or court), which can be also found
in municipal buildings.
The SaintGall Ontology was designed in such a way as to describe the SaintGall
map in detail. That makes it more complex than both the ontology of the Monastery of
Catania [3] and Ontoceramic [7], an ontology for the classification of pottery. Moreover,
the SaintGall Ontology cannot be represented in the set-theoretic fragment considered
in [4], used in recent work by some of the authors for ontologies representation and
4 http://www.cidoc-crm.org
reasoning. Thus, we intend to design a new decidable set-theoretic fragment admitting
the composition operator allowing one to represent and reason on the SaintGall Ontology.
Results in [5,6] are helpful to construct an appropriate decision procedure for such set-
theoretic fragment.
Acknowledgements
Work partially supported by the FIR project COMPACT: Computazione affidabile su testi
firmati, code: D84C46.
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