Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL
Abstract
This talk was presented on November 02, 2025 at the 5th International Workshop on Scientific Knowledge: Representation, Discovery, and Assessment (Sci-K2025), co-located with ISWC 2025 in Nara, Japan. This paper presents an approach to representing, discovering, and exploring research (meta)data in the cultural heritage (CH) domain. One key component is the NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO), a modular ontology for CH research data. Aligned with BFO and extending the mid-level ontology NFDIcore, CTO enables structured, interoperable metadata integration across diverse CH domains. Another key component is the the lightweight Linked Data platform SHMARQL, which supports querying and storytelling with RDF data, offering new possibilities for data discovery, reuse, and cross-domain integration. Both CTO and SHMARQL are integrated within NFDI4Culture, a consortium of the German NFDI programme for the national research data infrastructure that focuses on material and immaterial CH data. NFDI4Culture aims to make heterogeneous and decentralized research data findable and interoperable through the NFDI4Culture-KG and Portal. Designed with modularity and reuse in mind, both tools demonstrate great generalizablility and have been successfully applied beyond their original CH context.
Full text
Sci-K Workshop, co-located with ISWC2025 | Nara, Japan | 02 November 2025 Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL Tabea Tietz, Etienne Posthumus, Linnaea Söhn, Jonatan Jalle Steller, Oleksandra Bruns, Joerg Waitelonis, Torsten Schrade and Harald Sack
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL Research Knowledge Graphs ●Massive increase in scientific publications and research artifacts ●Need for structured, interoperable, and machine-understandable knowledge ●Traditional data management struggles with heterogeneity and fragmentation ●Drives the development of Research Knowledge Graphs (RKGs) and open data initiatives 2Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL Research Knowledge Graphs ●Represent research (meta) data in a semantically rich, interlinked way ●Capture relationships between datasets, collections, software, publications ●Enable advanced search, analysis, and reuse across disciplines ●Ensure interoperability and scalability for knowledge integration 3Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL Cultural Heritage Domain ●The Cultural Heritage (CH) domain illustrates both the need for and the potential of Research Knowledge Graphs (RKGs) ●CH research data are diverse, and often distributed across heterogeneous sources ●Each domain uses its own metadata standards, vocabularies, and formats 4
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL NFDI4Culture ●NFDI4Culture brings together tangible and intangible cultural heritage research data ●Part of the German National Research Data Initiative (NFDI) ●Domains: Architecture, Art History, Performing Arts, Media Studies, Musicology 5
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL NFDI4Culture ●NFDI4Culture brings together tangible and intangible cultural heritage research data ●Goal: NFDI has been creating a universal access point to decentralized and heterogeneous research data ●NFDI4Culture Information Portal and Knowledge Graph 6
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO) RQ1: How can cultural heritage research resources be represented to establish a unified index and centralized access point for decentralized and heterogeneous research data within the (German) cultural heritage landscape? 7
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO) RQ2: How can the requirements of the cultural heritage domain for the representation and discovery of research resources be met, while also providing interoperability to other domains, i.e. other NFDI consortia and beyond? 8
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL Contributions NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO) v.3.0 ●Represents an index of the decentralized CH research metadata ○Performing arts ○Musicology ○Art history ○Media studies ○Architecture ●Extends the NFDIcore mid-level ontology for cross-disciplinary interoperability. ●Aligns with the Basic Formal Ontology ●Builds the foundation of the NFDI4Culture KG and the NFDI4Culture Portal 1 9
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO) Domain Example 16
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO) Domain Example 17
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO) Domain Example 18
19 ●CTO provides a lightweight yet expressive framework for integrating decentralized CH metadata into a centralized, queryable infrastructure within NFDI4Culture ●Currently interconnects more than 18mio resources within NFDI4Culture ●Reused in the NFDI4Memory consortium NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO) Summary - Representation Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL 19
SHMARQL 20 RQ3: How can cultural heritage research resources be published and queried effectively to enable the discovery of decentralized research resources through a unified and centralized access point? Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL Contributions SHMARQL ●Lightweight web user interface for scholars to intuitively explore existing SPARQL endpoints ●Create queries, visualize results without deep technical expertise ●Semantic web application framework on which experienced practitioners can build custom projects and disseminate data effectively ●Originally created for NFDI4Culture to support data publishing → generalized into a versatile platform adopted by multiple projects ●Deployable with a single Docker command 2 21
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL SHMARQL Features ●Interactive browsing of Knowledge Graphs ●Navigate through triples by clicking IRIs in subject or object positions ●Eliminates manual SPARQL query creation when exploring new graphs 22
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL SHMARQL Features - Fizzysearch ●Built-in SPARQL re-writer Fizzysearch ●Extra search options to an existing triplestore: ○Flexible fulltext searches ○RDF2Vec searches 23
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL Use Cases: CTO and SHMARQL 24
Knowledge Representation and Discovery for Cultural Heritage Research Data with CTO and SHMARQL ●SHMARQL and CTO form the semantic backbone of the NFDI4Culture Data Stories platform based on the data in the NFDI4Culture-KG Use Cases: CTO and SHMARQL Data Stories 25 ●Combines semantic technologies with storytelling to foster data literacy and to provide a starting point for domain experts