ABSTRACT

The activities of COSCH community and the disciplines it represents were as diverse as they could possibly be in research into cultural heritage. To achieve common goals it was of utmost importance to have a common understanding of these diverse activities and disciplines. Work on the COSCH Knowledge Representation, or COSCHKR, was undertaken to develop a common semantic base representing different disciplines and to facilitate communication within the Action. The COSCHKR is an ontology-based inference model, guided by inference rules that provide a semantic bridge between various interdisciplinary activities involved in non-invasive technical documentation of material cultural heritage. The model is intended to support humanities experts by recommending optimal spatial and spectral techniques. The model may also be used by technology experts to compare their own solutions with the ones recommended through COSCHKR, and to understand why they may differ.

In this chapter we present the methods adopted for designing the COSCHKR and the steps in the development of the inference model. The difficulties in maintaining a common level of understanding within the diverse disciplines during the knowledge acquisition process are discussed. We present mechanisms and methods of information collection, its structuring, and aligning, to formulate different axioms and theorems within the model. The design and development of COSCHKR was based on an iterative procedure where the gathered knowledge was first verified with the group of experts before it was processed. This verification mechanism was important for the reliability of the model, ensuring technical consistency. This chapter highlights the importance of these iterative mechanisms in the validation of knowledge gathered and then information populated inside the knowledge base.

Keywords: COSCH ontology, knowledge representation, cultural heritage recording, Semantic Web technologies, inference system

Introduction

Spectral or spatial recording of material cultural heritage (CH) is an interdisciplinary task involving scientists and experts from the humanities, information technologies, and engineering. A mutual understanding and agreement about the complexities of undertaking such recoding tasks is necessary in order to deliver appropriate spectral or spatial data of physical cultural heritage objects adapted to the needs of cultural heritage experts who rely on and work with those data. The COST Action TD1201: Colour and Space in Cultural Heritage (COSCH) (Boochs 2012; Boochs et al. 2013), brought together these experts to enhance mutual understanding among the disciplines in order to better record and preserve material cultural heritage.