Ontologies of Cultural Heritage for Humans and Machines: The Cultural Heritage Abstract Reference Model

FAIR Heritage: Digital Methods, Scholarly Editing, and Tools for Cultural and Natural Heritage, Wednesday 17th June & Thursday 18th June 2020. Virtual meeting.Since the mid-20th century, two research strategies have been struggling to represent the world. On the one hand, Artificial Intelligence developed ontologies, with a focus on allowing computers to carry out automated reasoning about facts of the world. On the other hand, Software Engineering came up with conceptual modeling, with a focus on capturing the nuances of the world to help communication between people. Both lines of work have been applied to cultural heritage with varying fortune.Recent trends demonstrate that ontologies and conceptual models are not that different, and that combined approaches have advantages over either of them. Following this premise, we developed CHARM, the Cultural Heritage Abstract Reference Model (www.charminfo.org), an ontology of cultural heritage expressed in ConML (www.conml.org), a conceptual modeling language capable of describing “soft” issues such as subjectivity, temporality or vagueness. CHARM and ConML combine straightforward affordability to computing non-experts with a high level of formality for automated processing.In this talk I will describe CHARM and the major areas covered by it. I will also explain how we can easily capture complex cultural heritage phenomena by using ConML built-in features, and how these two technologies together can allow you to standardise the documentation of cultural heritage while maintaining a high degree of specificity, something that is often impossible when adopting off-the-shelf standards