An ontological data model for points of interest (POI) in a cultural heritage site

Abstract

AbstractCultural heritage (CH) reflects on the history of a society and its traditions and it is treated as the nation’s memory and identity. Digitizing and web, beside its benefits, brought some challenges in disseminating and retrieving CH information, which has heterogeneous content varying widely in type and properties yet encompassing rich semantic links. Semantic web technologies, especially ontologies, provide a common understanding inside a domain that helps sharing knowledge and interoperability. They can be very helpful in data modeling for a better information retrieval compared to relational databases as they take into account the semantics of information, guarantee reusability, and make information machine-readable that can offer more flexibility to intelligent services and applications. CH community is one of the first domains to make use semantic web technologies to deal with this issue. CIDOC CRM is the most used and famous ontology in CH domain, which is an ISO standard since 2006. Heritage sites are composed of many points of interest that attract visitors to find out about them. However, information about a particular POI is complex and interconnected with other people, events, and objects. In this paper, we aim to develop a POI-based data model for heritage sites in Iran using concepts from CIDOC CRM integrated with GeoSPARQL, the standard ontology in geospatial field, to incorporate spatial semantics with heritage information. This way the user can freely explore their preferred information about the places they desire. This can make it possible to use the data model for location-based services and applications in heritage sites.