Bridging Cultural Heritage Ontologies in VR Environment. A framework for querying and reasoning on the Temple of Venus and Rome restoration and documentation

VR applied to Architectural and Archaeological Heritage has a long history: Digital models in this field are evolving from an aesthetic simulation of reality, or, rather, a representation of the visual perception, to a more complex model: an information aggregation core. The investigation presents a research panel oriented to enhance the digital survey products - point clouds, meshes, 3D models -to be used as an intelligent visual archive assigning structured knowledge contents to artefacts’ geometry. The implemented case regards the Temple of Venus and Rome. Research, in progress, has been developed by the following steps: ) Subdividing the artefact geometry into subregions; 2) Developing the consolidation ontology for a few restoration classes; 3) Assigning (manually) to each artefact subcomponent, namely a mesh sub-region, a “smart label” including a link to its consolidation ontology instance. The aim is to combine the potential of VR visualization with ontology reasoning systems.