Extending RiC-O to model historical architectural archives: The ITDT ontology

Abstract

Historical architectural archives enjoy attention from diverse audiences, acting as a primary source of information for architects, historians, public authorities, and common citizens alike. In Italy, the interest in architectural archives has grown slowly but steadily for the last 20 years. However, architectural archives do not generally follow the trend common for museums and galleries in publishing digitized materials and providing standard metadata for individual records. The information that is available online usually includes only an archival finding aid, instead of metadata about the individual records, or fully digital versions of the records. While cataloguing standards for archival descriptions of architectural records have existed at least since the 1980s, the rise of Linked Open Data as a framework for publishing cultural heritage data has allowed archivists to enhance these archival descriptions with richer contextual information and links to external knowledge bases. In this paper we present the ITDT ontology, an extension of the Records in Contexts Ontology that facilitates the representation of architectural records and of the context related to architectural projects, its process, and participating entities. We discuss the application of the ontology to the project files of Italian architect and engineer Dino Tamburini (1924–2011), and the creation of a digital archive offering multiple perspectives over the records.