From Culture to Core: Integrating Cultural Heritage Data into Cross-Domain Research Infrastructures

Within the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) in Germany, the NFDI4Culture consortium addresses a critical challenge: unifying access to fragmented and semantically heterogeneous cultural heritage (CH) research data scattered across institutions and disciplines. This work presents the NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO), a strategically designed lightweight ontology that successfully bridges the gap to represent CH research resources between specialized domain requirements and interoperability demands across diverse cultural heritage fields including musicology, performing arts, and architecture. CTO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) on a foundational level and extends the established mid-level ontology NFDIcore, thereby maintaining the flexibility essential for capturing domain-specific nuances and is fully integrated into operational research data infrastructures. This contribution demonstrates how domain-specific ontologies can support both highly specialized research needs and broader cross-domain interoperability through modular architecture, and provides insights into proven modeling strategies, integration workflows, and lessons learned from a productive system in the CH domain.