Documenting the Structure and Adaptive Reuse of Roman Amphitheatres through the CIDOC CRMba Model

Abstract

This article addresses an important aspect of the built heritage documentation, which concerns encoding information about a building in a formal way, making it available for reuse by the research community. Formal ontologies allow structuring and integrating information from heterogeneous sources without loss of semantic information. In the field of Cultural Heritage (CH), the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) ontology is well known and widely accepted as it provides definitions and a formal structure to describe the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in the CH documentation. One of its extensions, the CRMba model, has been specifically designed to document information on a built structure and its components. In this work, we have applied the CRMba model to the documentation of Roman architectures, in particular, Roman amphitheatres, demonstrating how the semantic model allows encoding information about the structure of the building and its evolution over time and space, stressing on the concepts of “empty spaces” and “functional spaces” defined by form, and focusing on the relationship between form and function. The aim of the work is to explore the potentiality of the model and to provide, through a series of examples supported by graphs, standard encoding procedures to be reused by scholars dealing with similar case studies.