Ontology Engineering to Model the European Cultural Heritage: The Case of Cultural Gems

Abstract: Cultural gems is a web application conceived by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (DG JRC), which aims at engaging people and organisations across Europe to create a unique repository of cultural and creative places. The main goal is to provide a vision of European culture in order to strengthen a sense of identity within a single European cultural realm. Cultural gems maps more than 130,000 physical places in over 300 European cities and towns, and since 2020 it also lists online cultural initiatives. The new release aims, among other, to increase the interoperability of the application. At this purpose, we provide an overview on the current development of an ontology for Cultural gems used to map cultural heritage in European cities by using Linked Open Data (LOD) standards, and making the data FAIR, that is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. We provide an overview of the methodology, presenting the structure of the ontology, and the services and tools we are currently building on top.