Ontology and Software Tools for the Formalization of the Visualisation of Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs

Abstract

Over the last decade, several projects have been developed to digitise and semanticise cultural heritage data. They have been developed to preserve and maintain this heritage, but also to make it accessible to all types of users and to other sectors such as tourism and education. These developments combine the use of knowledge graphs and interactive visualisation tools with web technologies. Although remarkably interesting projects have been developed, the data visualisation tools in these projects tend to focus on the project context. Consequently, it is difficult to reuse the results of these projects. In addition, there are characteristics of cultural heritage information, such as uncertainty and spatial and temporal granularity, that have not been considered, and how to deal with them has not been described. The same is true for other aspects, such as the relationships between different objects. Considering these problems, this study presents a model that formalises how to visualise this information. The design of an ontology that implements this model, based on other works such as VUMO or VISO, is described. Furthermore, the design and development of a software framework that allows the visualisation of this information through a web application are presented. The evaluation of the application of this framework in projects such as SILKNOW or Arxiu Valencià del Disseny is outlined.