Towards a Spatial Semantic Management for the Intangible Cultural Heritage

Abstract

The Semantic Web introduces new exigencies for Cultural Heritage (CH) data managing and sharing, and such requests have to be considered for structuring the databases and Geographical Information System applications purposed to CH preservation strategies. Data semantics should be explicit, and formally specified by standard ontologies, and some proposals regarding CH are available by now. However, Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is related to the community that produced it, so it's more multifaceted and complex to be defined in a standardized way than material assets. This study is oriented to the integration of standardized or existing ontologies to define a convenient schema for managing ICH data; the general aim is to analyze the territorial distribution of ICH carried by some material artifacts to investigate their mutual relationships and values. We defined a conceptual model by integrating CIDOC-CRM ontology with some more specific and geometric entities derived from a spatial data standard, such as CityGML, for representing some ICH features in a GIS environment (Geographical Information System).