ArCo: the Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph
This provides a centralized, structured resource for researchers and cultural heritage administrators in Italy, though it is incremental as it builds on existing official catalogues.
The authors tackled the problem of organizing and providing access to Italian cultural heritage data by creating ArCo, a knowledge graph with 169 million triples about 820,000 cultural entities, distributed with tools and documentation.
ArCo is the Italian Cultural Heritage knowledge graph, consisting of a network of seven vocabularies and 169 million triples about 820 thousand cultural entities. It is distributed jointly with a SPARQL endpoint, a software for converting catalogue records to RDF, and a rich suite of documentation material (testing, evaluation, how-to, examples, etc.). ArCo is based on the official General Catalogue of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) - and its associated encoding regulations - which collects and validates the catalogue records of (ideally) all Italian Cultural Heritage properties (excluding libraries and archives), contributed by CH administrators from all over Italy. We present its structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and delineate its importance, quality, and impact.