mh-centre_v1 stands for "minor historical centre ontology, version 1".
This page is dedicated to store the OWL file of the ontology developed for the PhD thesis in Urban and Regional Development (Politecnico di Torino) of Elisabetta Colucci.
It is a work in progress, the ontology is open and standard-based (both architectural and geospatial) in order to allow the reuse of knowledge.
Here you can find the first version of the ontology developed in Protègè (https://protege.stanford.edu/).
This theme of research deals with geomatics and, it is about geographical information. Specifically, the main topic of this dissertation focus on the possibility to standardise spatial information in the domain of minor historical centres and the related architectural, built and landscape heritage. The notion of the urban centre, historical city, ancient urban area took different meaning and evolved during the centuries; this emphasises historical centres intended as a historical part of cities, villages and hamlets (urban, rural, minor or abandoned) with cultural, social and economic values. Due to their intrinsic evolution of functions, values, morphologies, and geometries, historical centres need to be preserved, documented, and safeguarded by urban actions, restoration plans, and renovations.
Hence, the study, the communication and the protection of built heritage are supported by many processes and require specific data to collect, store and post-process. In addition, these activities involve many disciplines, actors, and stakeholders, leading to sharing common knowledge and using a unique language. For this reason, the main topic of this research is the study of ontologies for spatial and geographical data. In Computer Science, an ontology is an information object or a computational artefact; it is a “formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation” (Studer et al., 1998). They are considered conceptual structures for formalising the explicit knowledge of a domain. Ontologies are very useful to create a unique and standard thesaurus and to ensure semantic interoperability. They allow the digital control of information and relations between different operating systems by communicating with geographic tools. Moreover, a formal ontology could clarify the use and the application of other techniques and web database concepts.
As above mentioned, the domain of this study is identified in historical centres. The main aim is their spatial and temporal documentation. Moreover, this method could help the decision-making process of small urban and rural areas in different scenarios (such as ancient, fortified villages, alpine hamlets settled in past centuries, historical city centres, ancient sites, ...).
The research wants to produce an accurate representation of reality through a multi-scale analysis approach and different levels of detail (using proper international standards of geographic information). The proposal tries to fill various gaps in the nowadays scenario of geographical sciences. There is no defined ontology containing helpful information to manage, share and collect data on historical centres and minor rural centres. Moreover, there is a lack of semantic formalisation for cultural built, urban, architectural heritage, and many interoperability problems.
This study will identify the semantic formalisation of historical centres designing an ontology starting from existing standards and knowledge to bridge these gaps. Then, this ontological structure will be validated, enriching and populating it with concepts and relations from real data case studies, existing regulations, documents, datasets and 3D integrated metric survey.
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