The HERACLES Ontology helps integrating data for the preservation of cultural heritage in the context of climate change. It was developed during the EU project HERACLES. HERACLES main objective is to design, validate and promote responsive systems/solutions for effective resilience of CH against climate change effects, considering as a mandatory premise an holistic, multidisciplinary approach through the involvement of different expertise. For further information about HERACLES, please click here.

The HERACLES Ontology describes several topics, which are categorized into nine domains listed in the table below.

Before introducing the main classes of the ontology, a brief paragraph will explain the following ontology schemata.

The ontology pictures shall enhance the readers’ comprehensibility about the relationships. The class pictures do not contain every property to enable the reader to keep track of the matter. For simplification, datatype properties and inverse properties are omitted. Class hierarchies appear, where they seem reasonable. Dashed arrows indicate a relationship property. Continuous arrows depict a parent-to-child class relationship. Instances of classes are shown in light-blue, edged boxes. A colon separates the content of instances box; the first part gives the name of the instance, the latter part gives the class the instance belongs to.

In the ontology, we distinguish between the classes Entity and Entity Type. An Entity Type represents the various types an instance of the class Entity can be instantiated as. This modelling enables the class Entity to compound several types. A damage for example can be of both types 'discoloration' and 'flaking'. The actual manifestation of the damage is part of the class Entity.

The ontology has been published or referenced in the following conferences or magazines:

• Moßgraber, J.; Paraskevi, P.; Padeletti, G. - An ontology for protecting Cultural Heritage against Climate Change. EGU General Assembly 2018, Vol. 20, EGU2018-13463, 2018.
• Moßgraber, J.; Hellmund, T.; van der Schaaf, H.; Montesperelli, G.; Curulli, A.; Padeletti, G. - Modelling the domain of Cultural heritage-materials in relation to climate change. European Materials Research Society Spring Meeting and Exhibit, Straßburg, France, 2018.
• Moßgraber, J; Hilbring, D.; Hellmund, T.; Pouli, P.; Padeletti, G. - An Ontology for Cultural Heritage Protection against Climate Change. The Twelfth International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing, Athens, Greece, 2018. This publication received the best paper award of the SemaPro Conference 2018. Available here.
• Hellmund, T.; Hertweck, P.; Hilbring, D.; Moßgraber, J.; Alexandrakis, G.; Pouli, P.; Siatou, A.; Padeletti, G. - Introducing the HERACLES Ontology - Semantics for Cultural Heritage Management. Heritage 2018, Volume 1, Issue 2, 377-391, December 2018. Available here.

For further information, please contact Tobias Hellmund (mail, Research Gate) or Jürgen Moßgraber (mail, Research Gate).

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The project leading to this application has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 700395.