Building our Cultural Heritage Ontology

MuseIT

MuseIT (Multisensory, User-centred, Shared cultural Experiences through Interactive Technologies) is a Horizon Europe project launched on October 1, 2022, focused on making cultural heritage more accessible, inclusive and engaging. Through multisensory technologies and interactive tools, it enables meaningful cultural participation and co-creation for people of all abilities, while also supporting the long-term preservation of cultural assets.

How we brought structure and meaning to cultural data in MuseIT

When we started working on the MuseIT project, one of the first challenges we faced was:
How do we bring together cultural data from different sources, formats, and contexts — and give it clear meaning and context?

The answer was simple in theory but demanding in practice:
We needed an ontology. Not just any ontology, but one designed for the specific needs of the project — flexible, interoperable, and semantically rich. 

We built an ontology that could adapt as the project evolved, supporting new types of content and relationships without needing to start over. It’s flexible enough to grow with our data and use cases.

It’s also interoperable — designed to work with existing standards and external datasets, making it easy to reuse, connect, and enrich data coming from various sources.

And most importantly, it’s semantically rich. That means it’s not just a list of categories, but a structure that captures meaning, context, and relationships

Relevant Ontologies

We didn’t start from scratch. We studied and reused properties and structures from established ontologies such as:

• Dublin Core – for general metadata like titles, dates, creators
• Schema.org – for compatibility with web-based platforms
• FOAF – for describing agents like people and organizations
• Other lightweight vocabularies where relevant

Instead of reinventing the wheel, we extended and mapped their vocabularies into a more project-focused semantic model.

What Our Ontology Covers

Our ontology (see Figure 1)  is designed to describe a wide range of cultural data, including:

• Artworks (paintings, sculptures, engravings, etc.)
• Metadata (creation date, creator, location, etc)
• Metadata about multimedia content, including accessibility information (visual, haptic, etc.) and originality status (original vs. representation in another modality)
• Periods and styles

And, most importantly, it allows meaningful linking across these dimensions.

Figure 1. Visualization of the Cultural Heritage Ontology developed for MuseIT, showing key classes, object properties, and data properties.

Why This Ontology Matters

This ontology is the foundation for all semantic operations in MuseIT:

• It powers our knowledge graph
• It supports recommendations based on meaning and context
• It enriches tools like MuseMeUp with cultural metadata

Without it, we’d just have isolated datasets. With it, we turn cultural content into something connected, reusable, and creatively explorable.

Curious about exploring or integrating our Cultural Heritage Ontology?

👉 Contact us or explore the ontology directly via the MuseIT project page.