Architectural heritage ontology concepts and some practical issues

Interoperability has become fundamental to the management and sharing of the data. For this reason, international standards are published and ontologies are proposed and used for structuring databases in order to assure information retrieval, improved analysis and correct interpretation of the data, besides the interoperability of compliant databases. For thematic data about cultural heritage, standards vocabularies and ontologies exits, but are not fully suitable to represent some aspects of architectural heritage. In fact, complex spatial data have to be equally managed using these technologies, for enabling analysis empowered by the inclusion of the spatial and geographical dimension. This could undoubtedly enrich the documentation of architectural heritage. However, few spatial ontologies exist, which are able to correctly represent the complexity and richness of such data. In the paper, an existing ontological model for cartographic urban themes, OGC CityGML, is extended, in order to propose a data schema for the management of architectural heritage multi-scale, multi-temporal and articulated data. The extended parts of the model are explained in the paper. Moreover, some implementation aspects are considered both for the definition of the ontological schema extension and for the management of the data using it.