George Bruseker

Formal ontologies such as CIDOC CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) form part of the central strategy for the medium and longterm integration of cultural heritage data to allow for its greater valorization and dissemination. Despite this, uptake of CIDOC CRM at the ground level of Cultural Heriage (CH) practice is limited. Part of the reason behind this lack of uptake lies in the fact that ontologies are considered too complicated and abstract for application in real life scenarios. This paper presents the rationale behind and the design of a CIDOC CRM game, the intent of which is to provide a learning mechanism to allow learners of wide backgrounds and interests to approach CIDOC CRM in a hands-on and interactive fashion. The CIDOC CRM game consist of decks of cards and game boards that allow players to engage with the concepts of a formal ontology in relation to real data in an entertaining and informative way. It is argued that the CIDOC CRM Game can form an important part of introducing the basic elements of formal ontology and this standard to a wider audience in order to aid wider understanding and adoption of the same.

Documenting the relevant aspects in digitisation processes such as photogrammetry in order to provide a robust provenance for their products continues to present a challenge. The creation of a product that can be re-used scientifically requires a framework for consistent, standardised documentation of the entire digitisation pipeline. This article provides an analysis of the problems inherent to such goals and presents a series of protocols to document the various steps of a photogrammetric workflow. We propose this pipeline, with descriptors to track all phases of digital product creation in order to assure data provenance and enable the validation of the operations from an analytic and production perspective. The approach aims to support adopters of the workflow to define procedures with a long term perspective. The conceptual schema we present is founded on an analysis of information and actor exchanges in the digitisation process. The metadata were defined through the synthesis of previous proposals in this area and were tested on a case study. We performed the digitisation of a set of cultural heritage artefacts from an Iron Age burial in Ilmendorf, Germany. The objects were captured and processed using different techniques, including a comparison of different imaging tools and algorithms. This augmented the complexity of the process allowing us to test the flexibility of the schema for documenting complex scenarios. Although we have only presented a photogrammetry digitisation scenario, we claim that our schema is easily applicable to a multitude of 3D documentation processes.

Architectural knowledge, representing an understanding of our built environment and how it functions, is a domain of research of high interest as much to lay people as to architects themselves, researchers in cultural heritage in general and formal ontologists. In this work, we aim to provide an initial approach to the question of how to model architectural data in a formal ontology structure and consider some of the problems involved. This question is challenging both for the inherent difficulties of the discourse to be modelled but also for the fact of the lack of available data sources for empirical research of architectural data and for the contentious nature of the definition of architecture itself. We therefore provide a brief exploration of the possible approaches to architecture as idea, process or thing as held by architects and theorists of architecture. On the basis of this, we attempt a modelling of the basic elements of architecture using FRBRoo, an extension of CIDOC CRM that can be used to model creative processes. We argue that with the addition of only four classes, to capture certain architecturally specific concepts and activities, we are able to provide an adequate first approach to this problem. By connecting this work to the existing extension of CRMba, which models built work as a system of relations of filled and unfilled spaces, an adequate ontological structure can be provided for beginning to explore the issues of the relation between architecture as idea, process and thing.

—This paper describes a practical implementation of a CIDOC-CRM modeled virtual argumentation reconstruction model using the open-source DB Drupal. It describes a workflow for entering virtual reconstruction paradata, metadata and data in order to allow the tracing of knowledge provenance in reconstruction in CH. A case-study is presented of the documentation of a reconstruction of the Lioness Lintel (Hephaisteion, Athens).

The outcomes of virtual reconstructions of archaeological monuments are not just images for aesthetic consumption but rather present a scholarly argument and decision making process. They are based on complex chains of reasoning grounded in primary and secondary evidence that enable a historically probable whole to be reconstructed from the partial remains left in the archaeological record. This paper will explore the possibilities for documenting and storing in an information system the phases of the reasoning, decision and procedures that a modeler, with the support of an archaeologist, uses during the virtual reconstruction process and how they can be linked to the reconstruction output. The goal is to present a documentation model such that the foundations of evidence for the reconstructed elements, and the reasoning around them, are made not only explicit and interrogable but also can be updated, extended and reused by other researchers in future work. Using as a case-study the reconstruction of a kitchen in a Roman domus in Grand, we will examine the necessary documentation requirements, and the capacity to express it using semantic technologies. For our study we adopt the CIDOC-CRM ontological model, and its extensions CRMinf, CRMBa and CRMgeo as a starting point for modelling the arguments and relations.