Towards a Domain Ontology for the Analysis of Ancient Fabrics The SILKNOW Project and the Case of European Silk Heritage

TL;DR

This paper discusses the SILKNOW project which leverages Semantic Web technologies to enhance visibility and understanding of European silk heritage from the 15th to 19th centuries through a knowledge graph and ontology extension.

Contribution

It introduces a novel CIDOC CRM-compatible extension for modeling the complex semantics of ancient silk fabric creation and production processes.

Findings

Development of a comprehensive knowledge graph for silk heritage

Creation of a specialized ontology extension for silk fabric semantics

Enhanced digital visibility of European silk history

Abstract

In this article, we present the SILKNOW project (Silk heritage in the Knowledge Society: from punched card to Big Data, Deep Learning and visual/tangible simulations) (2018-2021). This project aimed to use Semantic Web technologies to give greater visibility to silk objects produced and consumed in Europe between the 15th and 19th centuries. Silk is a particularly important material in European history, and it has produced some exceptional objects of great historical interest. However, it is a threatened heritage that is little known to the general public. We show the interest of using Semantic Web technologies to give more visibility to such a heritage, by describing the results we have obtained. We present the methodology used to develop a knowledge graph, and in particular the different steps that were necessary to create the underlying data model, based on the CIDOC CRM or CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. We also propose a CIDOC CRM-compatible extension to express the complex semantics of the creation and production process of ancient silk fabrics.