Towards a Domain Ontology for the Analysis of Ancient Fabrics The SILKNOW Project and the Case of European Silk Heritage
This work addresses the challenge of preserving and increasing public awareness of threatened silk heritage in Europe, though it is incremental as it applies existing Semantic Web technologies to a specific domain.
The SILKNOW project tackled the problem of making European silk heritage from the 15th to 19th centuries more visible by using Semantic Web technologies, resulting in the development of a knowledge graph and a CIDOC CRM-compatible extension to model the creation and production processes of ancient silk fabrics.
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.