Sharing the knowledge: exploring cultural heritage through an ontology-based platform

The exponential growth of data has made ontology modeling an up-and-coming research area for knowledge representation. One of the domains of interest is represented by Cultural Heritage, in which modeling of environments, such as archaeological parks, could lead to their protection and enhancement. In this scenario, the valuable dataset on the Naples Urban Archaeological Park (PAUN) is of particular interest. Due to its peculiarity, the database could benefit from innovative techniques for retrieving the information, representing a large part of the information contained within the DatabencArt platform, which collects data on Campania's cultural heritage. This paper aims to introduce an ontology-based approach to improve data retrieval, which could help expert users in the field (archaeologists, art historians, geologists, etc.). Scholars need to be able to easily compare the information. To this end, a semantic search is able to transform a vast amount of data into linked concepts. We mapped all concepts according to the ArCo ontology and equipped the DatabencArt platform with a semantic query layer, making the information accessible through ArCo ontology's properties. To evaluate the proposed approach, we designed an experimental campaign involving expert users to assess the results obtained in the system's queries through Sparql queries. The obtained results are promising.