Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL

This talk was presented on November 02, 2025 at the 5^th International Workshop on Scientific Knowledge: Representation, Discovery, and Assessment (Sci-K2025), co-located with ISWC 2025 in Nara, Japan.  

This paper presents an approach to representing, discovering, and exploring research (meta)data in the cultural heritage (CH) domain. One key component is the NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO), a modular ontology for CH research data. Aligned with BFO and extending the mid-level ontology NFDIcore, CTO enables structured, interoperable metadata integration across diverse CH domains. Another key component is the the lightweight Linked Data platform SHMARQL, which supports querying and storytelling with RDF data, offering new possibilities for data discovery, reuse, and cross-domain integration. Both CTO and SHMARQL are integrated within NFDI4Culture, a consortium of the German NFDI programme for the national research data infrastructure that focuses on material and immaterial CH data. NFDI4Culture aims to make heterogeneous and decentralized research data findable and interoperable through the NFDI4Culture-KG and Portal. Designed with modularity and reuse in mind, both tools demonstrate great generalizablility and have been successfully applied beyond their original CH context.