Evaluation of semantic web ontologies for modelling art collections

© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG. The need for organising, sharing and digitally processing Cultural Heritage (CH) information has led to the development of formal knowledge representation models (ontologies) for the CH domain. Based on RDF and OWL, the standard data model and ontology language of the Semantic Web, ontologies such as CIDOC-CRM, the Europeana Data Model and VRA, offer enhanced representation capabilities, but also support for inference, querying and interlinking through the Web. This paper presents the results of a small-scale evaluation of the three most commonly used CH ontologies, with respect to their capacity to fulfil the data modelling requirements of art collections

WASOS: An Ontology for Modelling Traditional Knowledge of Sustainable Water Stewardship

Recent work and publications concerning sustainable water stewardship in Rajasthan (India) highlight how contemporary challenges are eroding traditional, communal approaches to water stewardship through mechanised extraction beyond the renewable capacities of ecosystems. Our work is focused on developing a formal ontology for modelling the knowledge of traditional water stewardship in India’s drylands by capturing the key constitutional elements of regenerative methods. Our method follows an iterative evolving prototype process for delivering the first version of the Ontology for Sustainable Water Stewardship (WASOS). The ontology contains a moderate number of high-level classes and properties that represent the water management decisionmaking process. By making key relationships visible, we aim to support decision-making in complex catchments particularly where there are contested urban and rural claims on water