This preface to the SWODCH 2024 Proceedings provides information about the workshop and describes its scope and aims. It also presents an overview of the papers that appear in the workshop's proceedings. SWODCH 2024 is the fourth edition of the International Workshop on Semantic Web and Ontology Design for Cultural Heritage. It takes place in October 30-31 as a standalone event in Tours, France, echoing the start of ECHOES, a HORIZON-Europe project led by the CNRS under the scientific coordination of the director of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Val de Loire, located in Tours. The purpose of the workshop is two-fold: First, it aims to gather foundational research work on the design of conceptual models, knowledge graphs, ontologies, and Semantic Web (SW) technologies for Cultural Heritage (CH) and the Digital Humanities (DH). A plethora of heterogeneous and multiformat data currently available in these domains asks for principled methodologies and technologies to semantically characterise, integrate, and reason with data, and to support their retrieval, management, analysis and visualisation. Philosophical and sociological analyses of data, knowledge representation models, and modeling practices in CH and DH, possibly taking into account the social or historical dimensions of data, are also within the scope of the workshop. Second, SWODCH aims to bring together stakeholders from various fields of Computer Science and the Humanities, involved in the development and deployment of concrete SW solutions for CH, eficiently building, managing, exploring, visualising or mining CH knowledge graphs. More than 20 years after the beginning of this century, any SW solution should be designed according to the FAIR principles and the workshop supports the creation of datasets and applications that respect and are compliant with these principles.
The workshop received 11 submissions. Each paper was peer-reviewed by at least three experts in the ifeld based on five criteria: relevance to the topics of the workshop, originality, quality of presentation, technical quality, and reusability. 7 of the submitted papers were selected for presentation at the workshop and are included in these proceedings, resulting in an acceptance rate of 64%. The topics of the accepted papers included the development of new ontological models for lingustic phenomena (“An OWL Ontology for Linguistic Phenomena with Applications to Gallo-Italic Dialects in Sicily” ), scholarly observations (“Operationalizing Scholarly Observations in OWL” ) and spatio-temporal characteristics of cultural heritage entities (“Ontological Patterns for Modeling the Validity of Spatiotemporal Statements” ); ontology evaluation (“Assessing the expressivity of IconClass to embody emotional features in classical iconography” ); semantic annotation (“Towards an Annotation Data Model for a Scholarly Semantic Annotation Platform in Visual Heritage: A Case Study Using the Murten Panorama” ); spatio-temporal reasoning (“Spatio-Temporal Reasoning on Stratigraphic Data in Archaeology: Formalization of the Harris Laws as Inferences using CIDOC CRM ” ); and knowledge graphs (“Graphing Trees: The Nodes and Edges of Nabokov’s Worlds” ).
Acknowledgments We would like to thank all authors for their contributions (papers and presentations) to the workshop. We are also very grateful to the local organisers in Tours. A special thanks to our invited speakers, Achille Felicetti and Franco Niccolucci for their talk on Heritage Digital Twin, and Andreas Vlachidis for this talk on the Sloane Lab project. Last but not least, we would like to thank the excellent Program Committee for their hard work reviewing the submitted papers. Their criticism and very useful comments and suggestions, even for the papers that were not accepted, were once again invaluable for the success of the workshop. The names of the PC members as well as other information about the workshop are available on the workshop’s website: https://swodch2024.sciencesconf.org/.