Cultural Ontologies: the ArCo Knowledge Graph.
Introduction by OpenMethods Editor (Marinella Testori): Several definitions of what a knowledge graph is have been provided so far, as it is summarised in the article “What is a Knowledge graph?” by Michelle Knight (https://www.dataversity.net/what-is-a-knowledge-graph/). According to Ralph Hodgson, “A knowledge graph is a special kind of graph that combines flexibility and evolvability” and it features “two additional qualities” like that of being “semantic” and that of being “intelligent” (https://das2019.dataversity.net/sessionPop.cfm?confid=130&proposalid=11698).
Standing for ‘Architecture of Knowledge’, ArCo is an open set of resources developed and managed by some Italian institutions, like the MiBAC (Minister for the Italian Cultural Heritage) and, within it, the ICCD – Institute of the General Catalogue and Documentation), and the CNR – Italian National Research Council. A full illustration of the project is provided in the paper “ArCo: the Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph” by Valentina Anita Carriero et al. (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02840.pdf).
Through the application of eXtreme Design (XD), ArCO basically consists in an ontology network comprising seven modules (the arco, the core, the catalogue, the location, the denotative description, the context description, and the cultural event) and a set of LOD data comprising a huge amount of linked entities referring to the national Italian cultural resources, properties and events. It can be browsed thanks to a dedicated SPARQL endpoint: https://dati.beniculturali.it/sparql
Under constant refinement, ArCo represents an example of a “robust Semantic Web resource” (Carriero et al., 11) in the field of cultural heritage, along with other projects like, just to mention a couple of them, the Google Arts&Culture (https://artsandculture.google.com/) or the Smithsonian American Art Museum (https://americanart.si.edu/about/lod).
References
ArCo website: https://dati.beniculturali.it/arco-rete-ontologie
Carriero, Valentina Anita, Aldo Gangemi, Maria Letizia Mancinelli, Ludovica Marinucci, Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese, Valentina Presutti, and Chiara Veninata. 2019. “ArCo: The Italian Cultural Knowledge Graph” (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02840.pdf)
Knight, Michelle. 2020. “What is a Knowledge Graph?” (https://www.dataversity.net/what-is-a-knowledge-graph/)
Polikoff, Irene, and Ralph Hodgson. 2019. “Top Braid EDG – An Enterprise Knowledge Graph for Data Governance” (https://das2019.dataversity.net/sessionPop.cfm?confid=130&proposalid=11698).
Other projects mentioned in the post:
GoogleArts&Culture
https://artsandculture.google.com/
Smithsonian American Art Museum
https://americanart.si.edu/about/lod