D7.2 Infrastructure Implementation v.1 - Extended Executive Summary - Appendix 3: Classes and Properties of the ARTEMIS Ontology

This document describes in plain language how data are organized by ARTEMIS and related to each other to build the project Knowledge Base, i.e. the organized complex of the information about cultural heritage. Different concepts are grouped by similarity or intended use.

As is well known, the term ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definitions of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, or entities that pertain to one domain of discourse. In other terms, an ontology includes abstract entities – named classes –  which characterize a domain and the relationships – named properties – among them. Ontologies are of fundamental importance to describe and organize data and to enable powerful search engines. Using the same or compatible ontologies is the foundation for data interoperability. In the domain of cultural heritage, the standard is represented by CIDOC CRM, which is an ISO standard named ISO 21127:2023. Being an abstract concept, a class has no predetermined value: an actual value (called instance) belongs to a class, which is however independent from any specific content.

Appendix 3 of the ARTEMIS D7.2 document presents a fundamental part of the project ontology: the set of classes and properties that make it possible to describe, in a structured and interoperable way, the concept of a Reactive Heritage Digital Twin, that is, a reactive digital twin applied to cultural heritage. In this section, the concepts identified with the acronym HC followed by a number and a name represent the classes, namely the entities that can exist within the model. The concepts identified with the acronym HP followed by a number and a verbal expression represent the properties, namely the relationships that connect these entities to one another. Classes and properties borrowed by the main system – CIDOC CRM – or another CRM-compatible model are named in a similar way, with a different acronym that identifies the model to which they belong.

The underlying idea is that a cultural heritage asset should not be described merely as an isolated object, but as the centre of a complex information system. Around the asset, the system can gather historical descriptions, documents, images, 3D models, scientific data, sensors, signals, digital services, artificial intelligence components, computational operations and monitoring processes. The ontology therefore serves to organise this set of elements, making it possible to build a coherent, updated representation connected to the real-world assets: the Knowledge Base.