Paola RONZINO         (PIN Servizi Didattici e Scientifici per l’Università di Firenze, Prato, Italy)

Archaeological buildings documentation with the ARIADNE CRMba

This presentation addresses an important aspect of the built heritage documentation, which concerns encoding information about a building in a formal way, making it available for reuse by the research community. Formal ontologies allow structuring and integrating information from heterogeneous sources without loss of semantic information.

In the field of Cultural Heritage (CH), the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) ontology is well known and widely accepted as it provides definitions and a formal structure to describe the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in the CH documentation. One of its extensions, the CRMba model, has been specifically designed to document information on a built structure and its components.

The presentation will show how the CRMba model can represent the structural components of a Roman amphitheatre, describe the change of state and document its reuse. An innovative method highlights the concepts of “empty spaces” and “functional spaces”, defined by form, and focuses on the relationship between form and function. The presentation will demonstrate the potential of the CRMba model, and will provide, through a series of examples supported by graphic representations, standard encoding procedures that can be reused by scholars working on similar case studies.