Task group

Research in Cultural Heritage Documentation is conducted in a multitude of disciplines ranging from Humanities like Archaeology, History or Ethnology to Natural and Technical Sciences like botany, dendrochronology, architecture, surveying or geoinformation. Ontologies and semantic technologies are the most advanced methodological approach to integrate the data of this variety of disciplines. There is a big potential in the scientific knowhow combined within CIPA to advance research in the field of Cultural Heritage using ontologies. Big European initiatives like the ARIADNE infrastructure (Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe; http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu) or the ITN-DCH (Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage: Projecting our Past to the Future ; http://www.itn-dch.eu/) demonstrate. Data integration is one of the main motivations for the use of ontologies.

Ontologies like the CIDOC CRM (http://www.cidoc-crm.org/) are applied to harmonise the concepts of different sources to tackle the challenges arising in the Cultural Heritage domain. There is a variety of possibilities to implement ontologies in actual IT systems. Sematic Technologies are frequently used or specialised software systems like Arches (http://archesproject.org/), an open-source geospatial software system for cultural heritage inventory and management. It was developed jointly by the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund and manages CIDOC CRM modelled cultural heritage information with a geospatial user interface.

This CIPA Task Group should be an access point for people and institutions interested in the use of ontologies in the field of Cultural Heritage and a place where experiences with the application of ontologies can be shared both on a conceptual and a technical level. The web site of the Task Group (https://www.uibk.ac.at/vermessung/cipa_ontology_task_group.html) offers a platform to provide and exchange information related to ontologies in the form of resources with links that are described by 2-3 sentences and are helpful for the application of ontology in the field of cultural heritage. We invite everybody interested to share their resources related to the topic within the CIPA Ontology Task Group in order to provide more and better information.