Semantic Bridging of Cultural Heritage Disciplines and Tasks

Abstract

The Cultural Heritage (CH) domain encompasses a wide range of different disciplines, serving the study, interpretation, curation, and preservation of objects, collections, archives, sites, and the dissemination of related knowledge. In this context, stakeholders generate, retrieve, and share a vast amount of diverse information. Therefore, information interoperability has been considered a crucial task, especially in terms of semantics. In this way, the CIDOC CRM (International Committee for Documentation Conceptual Reference Model) has been widely used as an underlying model that offers interoperability between CH domain metadata standards and ontologies. To the best of our knowledge, an overall review of mapping, merging, and extending this core ontology, as well as an aggregate table which classifies and correlates those ontologies and standards, has not yet been presented. Our study conducts an aggregate review of relevant published efforts and outlines the various associations between them, encapsulating the CIDOC CRM and its specialized models, as well. This work aims to further clarify the field and scope of the different works, identify their methods, and highlight the semantic overlap, or differences, between them.