=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2375/short3
|storemode=property
|title=ArCo ontology network and LOD on Italian Cultural Heritage
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2375/short3.pdf
|volume=Vol-2375
|authors=Valentina Anita Carriero,Aldo Gangemi,Maria Letizia Mancinelli,Ludovica Marinucci,Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese,Valentina Presutti,Chiara Veninata
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/caise/CarrieroGMMNPV19
}}
==ArCo ontology network and LOD on Italian Cultural Heritage==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2375/short3.pdf
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ArCo ontology network and LOD on Italian Cultural Heritage
Valentina Anita Carriero Aldo Gangemi Maria Letizia Mancinelli
STLab, ISTC FICLIT ICCD
CNR Università di Bologna MiBAC
Rome, Italy Bologna, Italy Rome, Italy
valentina.carriero@istc.cnr.it aldo.gangemi@unibo.it marialetizia.mancinelli@beniculturali.it
Ludovica Marinucci Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese
STLab, ISTC STLab, ISTC
CNR CNR
Rome, Italy Rome, Italy
ludovica.marinucci@istc.cnr.it andrea.nuzzolese@cnr.it
Valentina Presutti Chiara Veninata
STLab, ISTC ICCD
CNR MiBAC
Rome, Italy Rome, Italy
valentina.presutti@cnr.it chiara.veninata@beniculturali.it
Abstract
ArCo (Architecture of Knowledge) is a collaborative project that involves the
institute of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage ICCD (Institute of Catalogue and
Documentation) and the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of CNR
(Italian National Research Council). ArCo aims at modelling the wide domain of
Italian cultural heritage for two main purposes: (i) building a network of ontologies,
compatible and aligned whenever possible with existing ontologies, that can be used
as a de facto standard for representing cultural heritage data; (ii) publishing ICCD data
as LOD: about 800.000 publishable files stored in the ICCD General Catalogue
database. In this paper, we present ArCo structure, design methods and tools, its
growing community, and we delineate its importance, quality, and impact in using
semantic technologies in the fruition of Cultural Heritage.
1 Introduction
The increasingly widespread use of semantic technologies and Linked Open Data (LOD) led Digital Humanities to re-
think their approach to knowledge management and sharing [1]. These technologies give Digital Humanities a means for
representing their knowledge and include it into a network of connected data on the web, thus encouraging its reuse and
further enrichment. In this context, ontologies play an essential role, as a technology for organizing knowledge by
abstracting data and information of a certain domain.
An increasing number of cultural institutions is choosing ontologies and LOD for modelling and publishing their
data, e.g. in Italy the Institute of artistic, cultural and naturalistic heritage of Emilia-Romagna (IBC-ER) [2] and the
Fondazione Federico Zeri [3,4], and, in Europe, a lot of institutions within the project Europeana [5].
In this paper we report the results of ArCo (Architecture of Knowledge) [6], a collaborative project that involves the
institute of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage ICCD (Institute of Catalogue and Documentation) and the Institute
of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of CNR (Italian National Research Council).
ArCo aims at modelling the wide domain of Italian cultural heritage for two main purposes: (i) building a network
of ontologies, compatible and aligned whenever possible with existing ontologies, that can be used as a de facto standard
for representing cultural heritage data; (ii) publishing ICCD data as LOD: about 800.000 publishable files stored in a
database, i.e. the General Catalogue, each describing a specific cultural property from diverse perspectives.
2 Related Work
The cultural heritage domain has an intrinsic complexity, due to the high number of different types of cultural properties
that a cataloguer may record, e.g. anthropological material, coin, park, painting, traditional music. They have a lot of
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shared information types (e.g. location, bibliography, dating), but also many peculiar characteristics (e.g. staircases and
floors in a building). Moreover, their description may be very detailed: for a cataloguer is possible to gather information
about measurements, exhibitions, documentation, authorship, inventories, relations between cultural properties, and so
forth.
There are many projects and models developed in the context of cultural heritage (CH), to model, publish and
connect data on the web: CIDOC-CRM [7,8], EDM [9,10], Cultural-ON [11], Fentry [12] and OAEntry [13] ontologies
are some relevant examples. A recent paper [14] discusses the main requirements that a model representing cultural
heritage should address, based on an analysis of CIDOC and EDM. Although we build on the good practices of such
existing effort, our use case required a level of granularity and a diversity of cultural property types that needed new
modeling effort.
To build ArCo, we directly reuse classes and properties from the core (roles, agents, locations) modules of OntoPiA
[15], an ontology and controlled vocabulary network for Italian Public Administration, and from Cultural-ON, an
ontology that models cultural events and sites [16]. We indirectly reuse patterns from existing ontologies, e.g. CIDOC
and Cultural-ON and include explicit alignments to them within ArCo.
3 Methodology
In the development of the project, we followed the principles of eXtreme Design (XD) [17], an ontology engineering
methodology based on ontology design patterns [18]. Fig. 1 depicts as XD applied to ArCo.
Fig. 1. Implementation of XD methodology in ArCo.
During the project initiation and scoping, domain experts shared with the ontology engineers’ team their knowledge of
the domain, providing guidelines and data model regulations for interpreting their data. A generic timeline and a release
plan with priorities were defined. As recommended, we worked in tight collaboration with our main “customer”, i.e. the
ICCD. However, given that the ICCD data will be openly published and have high potential for reuse by several other
stakeholders, we decided to interact with some representative of them since the very beginning of the process. In addition
to domain experts, other agents, such as companies, were involved in the definition of ontology requirements, initially
expressed in the form of user stories. The same requirements are reused in the ontology testing phase. Extending XD,
four selected companies were also included in an “Early Adoption Program” (EAP) that worked with the incremental
unstable releases of ArCo ontologies and data to test them for e.g. publishing their data according to ArCo ontologies,
linking their data to ArCo. The EAP members and all the other interested stakeholders created an active community that
interacts by means of a dedicated mailing-list [19], GitHub issues tracker [20] and meetups [21].
Pattern-based ontology design plays a central role [22]: by ontology design patterns we mean reusable successful
solution to a recurrent modeling problem [23] [24]. XD encourages the reuse of existing ODPs from online repositories
[25] as well as the development of new ODPs, when needed. Reused patterns are annotated with OPLa ontology [26], to
support users in identification, reuse and ontology mapping.
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Since XD is iterative and incremental, ArCo ontology modules and ICCD data are periodically published as unstable
releases: this allows us to involve customers and stakeholders in giving us continuous feedback on modeling and testing
activities, and to detect new emerging requirements at early stage.
4 ArCo Ontology Network and LOD
4.1 ArCo Release
ArCo release consists of a docker container, available on GitHub [27] and its running instance online [28], which contains:
- the user guide accompanying the release, with diagrams and explanations on the content of the release and of
each ontology module;
- the ontologies, including their source code and a human-readable HTML documentation;
- a SPARQL endpoint storing the General Catalogue data in RDF format, generated according to our ontologies;
- examples of Competency Questions (CQs), with the corresponding SPARQL queries, for supporting the data
query from the community;
- a RDFizer tool converting XML data represented according to ICCD cataloguing standards to RDF.
ArCo knowledge graph is also available on the MiBAC official portal [29] with its SPARQL endpoint [30].
4.2 ArCo Ontology Network
ArCo ontology network consists of seven ontology modules connected by owl:imports axioms. In Fig. 2, blue circles
depict ArCo modules; the green circle indicates directly reused ontologies; the orange circle indicates indirectly reused
and aligned ontologies. The network base namespace is https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/, and each module has its own
namespace (e.g. https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/).
Fig. 2. ArCo ontology network.
The arco module [31] represents the network, importing all the other modules. It models top-level concepts from the CH
domain, according to the ICCD cataloguing standards [32]. In particular, the hierarchy of the different types of cultural
properties is modeled as follows. The top-level class is :CulturalProperty, which has two sub-
classes :TangibleCulturalProperty, and :IntangibleCulturalProperty. The first is further specialized
in :MovableCulturalProperty and :ImmovableCulturalProperty.
More specific types of cultural properties are defined
as :DemoEthnoAnthropologicalHeritage, :ArchaeologicalProperty, :ArchitecturalOrLandscapeHeri
tage, :HistoricOrArtisticProperty, :MusicHeritage, :NaturalHeritage, :NumismaticProperty, :Pho
tographicHeritage, :ScientificOrTechnologicalHeritage, :HistoricOrArtisticProperty (see the
diagram [33] on Github).
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The core module [34] represents general concepts orthogonal to the whole network, which are imported by all other
ontology modules. This module reuses a number of patterns, such as the Part-of [35], the Classification [36] and the
Situation [37] patterns.
The catalogue module [38] models concepts related to the ICCD Catalogue, and in particular catalogue records, that
is the XML files recording all data gathered by a cataloguer on a particular Italian cultural property. The Sequence [39]
pattern is reused to model the different versions of the same catalogue record, represented by the class a-cat:
CatalogueRecordVersion.
The location module [40] is intended to cover spatial and geometry information. A cultural property may have
multiple locations, represented by the class a-loc:LocationType. In addition, the fact that a type of cultural property
location holds during a time interval is modeled by the a-loc:TimeIndexedTypeLocation, which implements and
specialises the TimeIndexedSituation [41] pattern.
The denotative description module [42] encodes the characteristics of a cultural property observed during the
cataloguing process, e.g. measurements, materials, techniques, etc. To represent those characteristics we reused and
specialised the Description&Situation [43] pattern for modeling both the technical status (a-dd:CulturalEntity
TechnicalStatus) and the technical description (a-dd:CulturalEntityTechnicalDescription) of a cultural
property.
The context description module [44] represents the context of cultural properties, in a broad sense, including the
information related to: authors, collectors, copyright holders, inventories, bibliography, etc. For example, in order to
represent the concept of an a-cd:Archival-RecordSet, i.e. fonds, series, subseries, etc., we reuse the Born Digital
Archives [45] pattern.
The cultural events module [46] is dedicated to cultural events and exhibitions involving a cultural property. It
extends, with some classes and properties (e.g. a-ce:Exhibition), the Cultural-ON ontology [11].
4.3 ArCo LOD
ArCo knowledge graph currently counts: 7 ontology modules, 327 classes, 379 object properties, 154 datatype properties,
395 restrictions. It counts about 170M triples and provides 24,008 owl:sameAs axioms linking to other datasets, such as
DBpedia [47], Wikidata [48], the ULAN [49] and TGN [50] Getty Vocabularies, Zeri&LODE [4], YAGO [51],
Europeana [52], Geonames [53]. The Entity linking is performed with LIMES [54], and the LIMES configuration files
used in the linking process are available on Zenodo [55].
Fig. 3 depicts an example of information of a painting with subject “Madonna con bambino” (tr.en. Madonna with
child). On the left side, there is the XML data, expressed as string and stored in the ICCD General Catalogue, and on the
right side there is the correspondent data in RDF format generated according to ArCo ontologies.
Fig. 3. An example of XML data from ICCD General Catalogue converted in RDF format according to ArCo ontologies.
5 Impact and Future Work
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In order to involve different stakeholders, we have organised a series of meetups associated with the ArCo releases. So
far, we had 5 meetups, each attended by about 20 participants, and 1 webinar; we received 35 GitHub issues, and 27
people joined the mailing-list.
ArCo has a potentially very strong impact on both Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities fields and related
domains. At international level, ArCo ontologies allow to represent very detailed information on cultural heritage of many
different types and ArCo data can be aligned to other CH data, ensuring a high reliable provenance. These ontology
network and dataset will be used by institutions (such as museums, designated for cultural heritage preservation and
enhancement), which intend to publish their data as LOD and/or link them to ArCo, as well as by companies and
individual consumers (i.e. researchers, students, practitioners, citizens) that own and use CH data for different purposes.
Good examples, among others, of ArCo early adopters are: Synapta team [56], which reuses ArCo ontologies for
representing musical instruments belonging to Sound Archives & Musical Instruments Collection (SAMIC) [57], and
Ricostruzione Trasparente project [58], which aims at linking its data about areas of Italy damaged by the earthquakes in
2016 to ArCo data.
Currently, an extraordinary amount of data on Italian cultural heritage, in the form of a LOD dataset, is available to
anyone interested in querying, consulting and reusing them. ArCo ontologies are released and adopted directly by ICCD,
which provides Italian regulations for cataloguing cultural properties. Therefore, ArCo has become, in LOD context, a
standard for Italian cultural institutions aiming at creating Linked Data, according to ministerial regulations.
Since the valorization of cultural heritage through LOD enables sharing and reusing of cultural heritage data in an
open interconnected and multi-domain knowledge base on the Web, we plan to improve ArCo ontology network and
LOD. Future efforts will be directed to: (i) model peculiar information regarding natural heritage and information related
to archive and library domains, (ii) improve entity-linking, and (iii) provide tooling support for CH data owners in order
to encourage and simplify the adoption of ArCo and other ontologies by domain experts.
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