Maria João CORREIA & António SANTOS SILVA (Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil, Lisbon, Portugal

Implementing the ARIADNEplus ontology and vocabularies for built structures

Data on built structures and comprising materials, and their evolution, is essential for performance benchmarking, for improving knowledge, and further support to the decision-making process for the conservation and restoration of built heritage.

DB-HERITAGE (http://dbheritage.lnec.pt) provides systematic recording of data on the history, properties and performance of heritage and associated building materials.

DB-HERITAGE displays a hierarchical description of the structures and their linked data, including details of their evolution in both space and time. The data management however needed an upgrade to advanced standards for interoperable datasets, from which information can be easily extracted and used. The required metadata standards, vocabularies, ontologies, and other common principles and practices, have been provided by ARIADNEplus.

Implementation of the ARIADNEplus data catalogue ontology (AO-Cat) for the first level of data of built structures, according to the DB-Heritage schema, was straightforward, i.e., easily made by mapping DB-Heritage data attributes to suitable AO-Cat classes and properties. But the detailed description of the assets, including the relations between their components and the respective evolution through space and time, is quite complex. Specific concepts and model extensions (e.g. CIDOC CRMba and CRMhs) are nevertheless required to address all the requirements for the item-level description of built structures.

The DB-Heritage vocabulary terms have been matched to the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, making use of the ARIADNEplus Vocabulary Matching Tool. Portuguese terms and scope notes have also been proposed, which contribute to improving multilingual vocabularies and enable queries in Portuguese.

Participation of DB-Heritage in ARIADNEplus has provided the tools for a more comprehensive, active and informed data sharing.