Online Ontology-Based Knowledge Representation of Historic Buildings: Publishing an RDF-Based Website

Abstract

An online ontology-based knowledge representation system for historic buildings and their multimedia data is introduced in this paper. The ontology is combined from different schemas to capture knowledge of an architectural heritage and annotate visual data. Basically, a Core Data Index metadata schema in RDF describes types of buildings in a world heritage site, the Citadel of Bam (which was seriously damaged by an earthquake in 2003). The history of the buildings in the Citadel with around twenty centuries of habitation is captured from multiple resources such as travelogues, archeological reports, etc. and connected with a multilingual term-set. Each building together with the conceptualized knowledge is geo localized by UTM coordinates over Google Earth. Visual data of the buildings are connected with the knowledge-base and a Dublin Core Element Set metadata schema is applied to annotate the data, specifically results of the supporting project, the 3D CG reconstruction of the Citadel after the quake (such as rendered images, walkthrough and QTVR videos, etc.). The ontology and related resources are represented by RDF and then published into HTML pages, on a hierarchical layer structure of semantic web and web application frameworks. We present the architecture of the system, “Bam 3D CG” and discuss practical problems when building an online RDF-based system for publishing knowledge and visual data of historic buildings in a website.