The Ontologization of Conservation and Rehabilitation Interventions in Heritage Buildings

The study of heritage buildings inherently encloses extensive multidisciplinary big data sets of information that should be organized, defined, and categorized. Due to their intrinsic value heritage buildings are more challenging and demanding than the new-built constructions, especially when interventions related to their conservation, rehabilitation, and improvements as refurbishment and retrofitting are considered. The heritage building lifecycle activities integrate a multitude of technologies like big spatial data acquisition and processing, ontology-based semantic segmentation and as-built building information modelling. These technologies help heritage building experts to aggregate data into meaningful form. Ontologies provide them with an accurate knowledge representation of the concepts, relationships and rules. The International Committee for Documentation Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM) provides classes and properties declarations for the creation of domain ontologies in the cultural heritage information field, which encompasses heritage buildings. In the paper, an interpretation of the CIDOC-CRM, the Erlangen CRM/OWL is reused and extended to cover the mentioned interventions. The resulting ontology is then evaluated in terms of quality of its structure, functional adequacy, transferability, reliability, compatibility, maintainability, operability and interoperability. The presented work will improve knowledge-sharing and reuse among all stakeholders involved in heritage building projects.