Neoclassica - A multilingual domain ontology representing material culture from the era of classicism in the semantic web

Abstract

This paper presents an ontology created for classifying and researching material culture and its visual representations, that forms a part of an emerging data-driven research framework on Neoclassicism (ca. 1760–1860). The framework, named Neoclassica, unites a top down approach to knowledge discovery, represented by the Neoclassicaontology, with innovative methods and techniques for processing multimodal data corresponding with a bottom-up approach. Below we will first describe the Neoclassica framework, discussing the epistemological considerations related with it. Second, we outline the basic objectives of the ontology and explore differences to existing thesauri, as well as relationships with existing standards (CIDOC-CRM). Third, we will give an overview of the most important classes currently provided by the ontology and illustrate the features of the multilingual approach and the descriptive power already inherent to the ontology. Finally, we will give an outlook on the next steps for developing the Neoclassica framework.