Populating the Digital Space for Cultural Heritage with Heritage Digital Twins

The present paper concerns the design of the semantic infrastructure of the digital space for cultural heritage as envisaged by the European Commission in its recent documents. Due to the complexity of the cultural heritage data and of their intrinsic interrelationships, it is necessary to introduce a novel ontology, yet compliant with existing standards and interoperable with previous platforms used in this context, such as Europeana. The digital space organization must be tailored to the methods and the theory of cultural heritage, briefly summarized in the introduction. The new ontology is based on the Digital Twin concept, i.e. the digital counterpart of cultural heritage assets incorporating all the digital information pertaining to them. This creates a Knowledge Base on the cultural heritage digital space. The paper outlines the main features of the proposed Heritage Digital Twin ontology and provides some examples of application. Future work will include completing the ontology in all its details and testing it in other real cases and with the various sectors of the cultural heritage community.Comment: Submitted to Data - An Open Access Journal from MDPI. 29 pages, 9 figure

CIDOC CRM as the basis of the Electronic State Register of Immovable Cultural Heritage of Ukraine

Abstract. The article is the final in a series of articles on Conceptual Provisions for the Creation of a New Electronic State Register of Immovable Cultural Heritage (CH) of Ukraine. These provisions correspond to the components of the Solutions Framework (SoFr) of special Spatial Information Systems (SpIS) defined in the monograph [15]. The special SpIS of the new registry of the CH of Ukraine should belong to the class of Atlas Geoinformation Systems (AGIS), which is described in [14]. The first queue of AGIS – AGIS-CH1 – is proposed as the first queue of the new electronic State Register of Immovable CH of Ukraine. The first queue should include, at least, three components that are simultaneously SoFr packages: Products-Processes-Basics. The conceptual provisions of AGIS-CH1 describe these three most important components of the architectural pattern of AGIS-CH1: AGIS-CH1.Products, Part 1 [17]; AGIS-CH1.Processes, Part 2 [18], AGIS-CH1.Basics, Part 3, consisting of two subparts, 3.1 and 3.2. Subpart 3.1 is described in the article [19]. This article describes subpart 3.2, which is called "Basics. CIDOC CRM". It consists of two main sections. The first of these initially examines the prerequisites that lead to the use of CIDOC CRM. Such prerequisites are two evolutions: system and subject. System evolution claims that the time has come to consider the registry of the CH of Ukraine as a SpIS of the Web 3.0 Formation, also known as the Semantic Web, especially if we have in mind the creation of a new registry. Subject evolution refers to the evolution of understanding of the domain of cultural heritage. From the review of this issue in the monograph [4], it is obvious that modern CH registers should be "process" rather than "product". In order to proceed to the consideration of CIDOC CRM with a better understanding of the essence of the issue, the CHARM model (Cultural Heritage Abstract Reference Model) was considered. CIDOC CRM can also be considered as such, but CHARM is described in an excellent monograph [4] that is practically applicable, unlike the scattered articles on CIDOC CRM. The second of the two main sections of the article deals with CIDOC CRM and its use. We do not describe CIDOC CRM completely. Attention is paid only to its "spatial" and "process" parts. In addition, attention is paid to the use of CIDOC CRM. For this, the information from the website (https://www.cidoc-crm.org/how-i-can-use-cidoc-crm, 2023-jun-26) is used first. Then there is some initial information about the Arches software platform. We offer the Arches platform for the implementation of AGIS-CH1. Key words: Solutions Framework (SoFr), Atlas geoinformation system (AGIS), Basics of AGIS SoFr, register of CH as the first queue of AGIS