=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2518/paper-WODHSA1
|storemode=property
|title=OntoBellini: Towards an RDA Based Ontology for Vincenzo Bellini’s Cultural Heritage
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2518/paper-WODHSA1.pdf
|volume=Vol-2518
|authors=Salvatore Cristofaro,Daria Spampinato
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/jowo/CristofaroS19
}}
==OntoBellini: Towards an RDA Based Ontology for Vincenzo Bellini’s Cultural Heritage==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2518/paper-WODHSA1.pdf
OntoBellini: towards an RDA based
ontology for Vincenzo Bellini’s cultural
heritage
Salvatore CRISTOFARO a and Daria SPAMPINATO a
a Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione - CNR, Italia
salvatore.cristofaro@istc.cnr.it, daria.spampinato@cnr.it
Abstract. The rich cultural heritage preserved in the Belliniano Civic Museum
of Catania has been studied and promoted in the last years mainly thanks to the
BellinInRete project. It includes collections of objects (or resources) of a very dif-
ferent nature: paintings, photos, pianos, autograph scores, manuscript leaves, books
preserved in the Museum’s library, etc. In order to make the Belliniano Museum’s
heritage interoperable and reusable by scholars and cultural operators, we propose
to semantically organize it in a unique homogeneous container, the OntoBellini
ontology, designed and developed according to the Linked Open Data and Semantic
Web paradigms. The wide variety of the involved museum resources, not even fully
digitalised and catalogued, led us to the idea of experimenting with the RDA (Re-
source Description and Access) standard for creating library and cultural heritage
resource metadata.
In this paper we describe the ongoing work towards the realization of the Onto-
Bellini ontology.
Keywords. Vincenzo Bellini, Museum, Cultural heritage, Ontology, RDA
1. Introduction
The cultural heritage preserved in the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania includes col-
lections of objects (or resources) of a very different nature; in fact, the currently identified
resources consist of about:
– 250 objects among paintings, photos, pianos, brooches, watches, furnishings,
posters, medals, textiles, etc.;
– 4, 500 manuscript leaves of documents and letters;
– 9, 300 sheets of manuscript scores;
– 1, 900 printed scores;
– 50 printed music booklets;
– 280 books of the museum library;
– 60 vinyl records of various musical compositions.
Copyright c 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution
4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
In the last years, this rich cultural heritage has been promoted particularly by BellinIn-
Rete project [1]. The BellinInRete project stems from the collaboration between the Mu-
nicipality of Catania, the CNR Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of Cata-
nia and the University of Catania’s Department of Humanities. The project aims at re-
newing and creating a lasting change in the exploitation and enhancement of the Bellini-
ano Civic Museum of Catania.
In order to make the Belliniano Museum’s heritage interoperable and reusable by
scholars and cultural operators, we propose to semantically organize it in a unique ho-
mogeneous container, the OntoBellini ontology, designed and developed according to
the Linked Open Data and Semantic Web paradigms. The wide variety of the involved
museum resources, not even fully digitalised and catalogued, led us to the idea of exper-
imenting with the RDA (Resource Description and Access)1 standard for creating library
and cultural heritage resource metadata [2].
In this paper we describe the ongoing work towards the realization of the OntoBellini
ontology.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we briefly review some related works.
Then, in Section 3 we describe the work carried out and in progress concerning the
analysis and the representation of the Belliniano Museum’s resources, motivating the
exploration and exploitation of RDA to build up the OntoBellini ontology. Finally, in
Section 4 we draw our conclusions and discuss some hints for future works.
2. Related works
Various proposals concerning the semantic organization of museums cultural heritage
have been presented over the years. A lot of them relies on the CIDOC Conceptual Ref-
erence Model (CRM)2 , which is the international standard for the controlled exchange of
cultural heritage information since 2006. CRM provides a general core ontology which
can be adopted in cultural heritage contexts to develop semantic web-based information
systems, and to improve information sharing. Based upon CRM, semantic web models
have been devised aiming at enhancing semantic expressivity in the cultural heritage do-
main and to address specific issues not completely covered by other existing models.
This is the case, for instance, of the OA entry and the F entry ontologies presented in
[3] which enrich CRM descriptive capabilities by defining several possible relations be-
tween works of art (OA entry) and photography (F entry), following the ICCD Italian
content standards Scheda OA and Scheda F, respectively. In [4] it is possible to find an
extensive listing of other projects and proposals underlined by CRM in the domain of
cultural heritage.
Recently, the RDA standard has emerged in the context of cultural heritage promo-
tion. The main objectives of RDA are to identify and to relate entities at an abstract level.
Originally, RDA implements the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records
(FRBR) data model, classifying information resources in terms of a four-level entity hi-
erarchy called WEMI (Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item)3 . In fact, in its Novem-
1 http://www.rda-rsc.org/
2 http://www.cidoc-crm.org/
3 https://www.ifla.org/best-practice-for-national-bibliographic-agencies-in-a-digital-age/
node/8915
ber 2016 meeting, the RDA Steering Committee subsequently agreed in adopting the
IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM)4 as a conceptual model for the development of
RDA5 , superseding FRBR.
RDA aspires to provide a universal standard for data recording, a unique code for
representing heterogeneous resources that can be found in:
(A) libraries (manuscripts, books, music and movies);
(B) archives (institutional documents, personal and family papers and business docu-
mentation);
(C) museums (works of art, costumes, artifacts and natural objects and photos).
To be highlighted that within the Italian context, the resources related to the union Li-
braries, Archives and Museums are managed, through the use of sound and acknowl-
edged standards, by the respective institutions ICCU, ICAR and ICCD, coordinated by
MAB (Musei, Archivi, Biblioteche) Italian Association6 .
3. Museum data re(organization)
Within the BellinInRete project, the Belliniano Civic Museum’s heritage has been par-
tially studied and analysed by musicologists, and by other museum personnel with
archival and library skills, aiming at retrieving information about the museum resources.
The museum resources have then been formally represented as data records comprising
different fields of information (see below). The collection of these records forms the basis
which our proposed semantic organization of the Belliniano’s heritage relies upon7 .
Records for the museum resources have been created following the ICCD and ICCU
Italian standards for cataloguing and documentation (Scheda OA, Scheda F and SBN
cards)8 . The number of fields in each record, and their meaning, depends on the type of
resource represented by the record itself. There have been identified 14 different basic
types of museum resources, namely9 :
– Manoscritti (Manuscripts)
– Testi a stampa (Printed texts)
– Musica manoscritta (Manuscript music)
– Musica a stampa (Printed music)
– Materiale grafico (Graphic material)
– Arredi (Furniture)
– Dipinti (Paintings)
– Documenti (Documents)
– Foto (Photo)
– Medaglie (Medals)
4 https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11412
5 http://www.rda-rsc.org/ImplementationLRMinRDA
6 http://www.mab-italia.org/
7 Notice that, actually, the number of the created records correspond to about 70% of the total number of
estimated museum resources. The involvement of the remaining resources is planned for the early future.
8 http://www.iccd.beniculturali.it/, https://www.iccu.sbn.it/it/
9 Notice that the italian language has been used to record resource information.
– Statue (Statues)
– Strumenti musicali (Musical instruments)
– Tessuti (Textiles)
– Oggetti generici (Generic objects)
(Notice that, for completeness, in the list above we have reported the English translations
(enclosed in parentheses) of the Italian terms (written in boldface) originally adopted to
name basic types.) Within each basic type, the resources are subdivided, in turn, into
more restricted, specialized subtypes. For instance, Manoscritti includes: letters, draft
letters, copies of letters, baptismal certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates,
expense reports, medical bulletins, etc. The Materiale grafico includes the posters, while
the scores fall within the Musica manoscritta. Oggetti generici involve items owned
by Vincenzo Bellini, such as watches and brooches, and other every-day life objects
like spoons, knives, cups, etc. Figure 1 reports a selection of record fields in tabular
form. Note that the information block stored within some record fields, presents a high
Figure 1. Some records corresponding to the Belliniano Museum’s resources: green rows contain record field
names; blue rows denote resource basic types. Notice that the top most table involves only paper printed
resources.
level of granularity (coarse-granularity) which could be further refined by splitting the
block across additional (atomic) data fields. This is the case, for instance, of the formato
field (see Figure 1: the second to last column of the top most table) which is used to
composedly describe certain physical characteristics of a manuscript such as dimensions,
number of pages, foliation, writing direction, etc. It is worth mentioning that certain
record fields are specific to the particular type of museum resource described by these
fields. For instance, the lingua field (cfr. Figure 1) has been specifically designed to
represent the language(s) of written resources. Similarly, it makes no sense to talk about
the foliation of a table or a chair (cfr. the field formato). We mention further that the
Belliniano Museum’s heritage even involves certain compound physical objects (such as
medal containers and photo frameworks) which require a hierarchical record structure
to be reasonably described10 . Additionally, the Belliniano preserves also some music
booklets which have not been catalogued yet. Also, we underline that several archival
documents (like the various certificates), have received a rough analysis: it is planned
to create detailed metadata for them by following the standards adopted by the National
Archiving System of Italy (Sistema Archivistico Nazionale)11 .
As it emerges from the considerations above, the created representations of the
Belliniano Museum’s resources present a coarse, heterogenous character which makes
it difficult to effectively translate them into an homogenous knowledge base. (Note that
this partly derives from the particular representation criteria adopted for creating the data
records corresponding to the museum resources.)
In order to improve such representations it would be useful to first clean, refine and
then possibly merge the recorded data, so as to obtain a more uniform record collec-
tion. Then, RDA guidelines could be fruitfully exploited to get a more effective data
(re)organization. In fact, RDA, through the WEMI classification mechanism (which in-
herits from FRBR), lends itself better than (e.g.) CRM to the description of both mu-
seum collections (composed of unique objects, and for which CRM has been primarily
designed) and bibliographic resources held by libraries, as well as archival documents12 .
In very general terms, the main activities involved in the (future) development of
the OntoBellini ontology, can thus be schematized as follows. After a first phase of data
restructuring, aiming at creating more homogeneous, finer-grained record collections (as
described above), it is planned to identify the main concepts and properties underlying
the OntoBellini ontology in compliance with RDA’s entity-relationship framework.
4. Conclusions and future work
In this paper we have proposed to semantically organize the rich cultural heritage pre-
served in the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania into a shared ontology–the OntoBellini
10 Actually, such compound objects have not yet been disassembled for conservation reasons, and therefore,
at the present, it was possible to retrieve only poor descriptive information for them. The created records for
these resources are in fact poorly informative.
11 http://san.beniculturali.it/SAN
12 We mention that, basing on the IFLA FR models, an extension of CRM has been developed, namely FR-
BRoo (http://www.cidoc-crm.org/frbroo/home-0), which intends to represent the semantics of bibli-
ographic information and to facilitate the integration and interchange of bibliographic and museum resources.
However IFLA LRM, as an underlying conceptual model of RDA, allows for a greater level of generality than
FRBRoo, as it includes less details compared to this latter.
ontology–, relying upon the large amount of currently recorded data for the museum re-
sources. The heterogeneous character of the recorded museum data, requires however a
preliminary reorganization of the data itself in order to make it more homogeneous and
easily encoded into the ontology. To this end we plan to exploit the RDA guidelines for
creating library and cultural heritage resource metadata.
Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the “Patto per Catania” under the “Fondo Sviluppo
e Coesione 2014-2020: Piano per il Mezzogiorno”.
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