The painting ontology

In the last years there has been a growing interest in modelling cultural heritage content in general and artifacts in particular. This has come about as a result of the appearance of large information systems that are becoming available on the Semantic Web. Although recent developed models introduce wide typology of labels that allow to record knowledge from different cultural institutions they do not capture the complete information of specific artifacts such as paintings, sculptures, photographs, etc. In this paper we describe the painting ontology which provides a model to store and present detailed information about painting objects in the framework of the Semantic Web. The main reference model of the painting ontology is the domain specific CIDOC-CRM ontology.

The painting ontology defines specific concepts that are centred around painting objects while focusing on improving the interoperability of digital content held by museums, archives and other institutions. It provides the conceptualization that is needed to annotate structured specifications of museum objects encoded in museum documentations and to generate coherent object descriptions. The potential suitability of the developed model is for natural language applications. The presented ontology contains 187 classes and 93 properties of which 24 classes are equivalent to classes from the CIDOC-CRM and 17 properties are sub-properties of the CIDOC-CRM properties. In addition, 233 individuals are associated with each class.