Semantic Web, Cultural Heritage, and Art Historical Knowledge: Conceptual Models, Ontologies, and Epistemological Implications

The adoption of semantic web technologies in the field of cultural heritage and art history is of great interest due to its potential to diversify the ways of accessing cultural content; This is the case of the development of ontologies and knowledge graphs. The potencialities are to broaden the narratives that can be developed from them and to increase the chances of extracting implicit knowledge from large data sets. Likewise, semantic web technologies facilitate the structured and semantically enriched recording of cultural content, enable its publication as linked open data (LOD), increase the interoperability of distributed information and provide the mechanisms that allow the reuse of data for the generation of data. of new knowledge and value. The results achieved so far are important; however, there are still numerous challenges to face.

This seminar aspires to be a contribution to this technological-intellectual arena, focusing special attention on the epistemological implications involved in the building of conceptual models and ontologies for the cultural heritage and art history fields. Some of the issues that will be addressed are, for example, fuzzy and ambiguous temporalities, overlapping and interweaving interpretative layers, post-anthropocentric conceptual hierarchies, epistemological biases, cultural conventions embedded in existing models, etc.

This seminar, with the format of a professional meeting, has been organized by the Telefónica-UMA Chair scholarly actions, with the collaboration of the Museo Picasso Málaga and forms part of the Andalex (PY PY20_0058, UMA20-FEDERJA-126) and Complexhibit (PID2021-125037NB-I00) projects of the University of Malaga, which have among their objectives the development of OntoExhibit, a specific ontology of the art exhibitions domain, and their associated discursive and social practices.