Architectural heritage knowledge modelling. An ontology-based framework for conservation process

This paper presents an ontology-based model to support knowledge representation and management during investigation activities for architectural heritage conservation. Despite the relevant impact of Information and Communication Tecnologies (ICT) on architectural heritage, current approaches are commonly conceived in order to provide flexible and reusable tools and methodologies, proposing oversimplified procedures eventually unreliable for an accurate conservation project. Few experiences have recently shown a major attention on conservation specificities, although they focused on the different specific activities and knowledge domains related to a conservation process (such as cataloguing or monument damage), the importance to deal with them in an integrated way is in most cases neglected. Hence all the different steps of the process, such as the preliminary phase of knowledge acquisition, the synthesis which arouses value assessment, diagnostics, design, construction phase and maintenance, become isolated activities. This lack of synergy often compromises the final result. In order to deal with the complexity of historical architecture representation, and its conservation process, the proposed model defines four main knowledge domains (Artefact – Lifecycle – Architectural Heritage Investigation Process - Actors) where all the knowledge related to the artefact is formalized through semantic networks in terms of entities, properties and relationships. Specific reasoning and inference rules allow coherence checking of the model in order to reduce information discrepancies, inconsistencies and errors. The proposed model offers an high accuracy of the description capacity and, in the meanwhile, a broad versatility within representation modelling, granting so a reliable representation of the multifold issues that each single building may eventually require, according to its features and state of conservation Moreover, the versatility of the model provides a suitable representation even for the different nature of the investigation activities results weather they are analytical or hermeneutical. The knowledge base has been finally connected with a building information modelling environment, providing an effective integration between geometrical and non-geometrical information.