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Geospatial Ontology to support the Documentation of Minor Historical Centres

Historical centres express both cultural heritage values and urban characteristics. For this reason, many actors, and communities, such as historians, architects, urban planners, and restores, have recognised the great importance of the documentation of those buildings, expressions of identity and intangible cultural values for both the local and further societies. Many processes support the study and the documentation of cultural, architectural, and built heritage with different aims and tasks (preservation, planning, valorisation, restoration).

Another facet regards the new tendencies of the last years to focus on rural areas and small centres. Because of the necessity of sustainable, environmental opportunities, such as the decentralisation, the revitalisation, development and the re-inhabitation of countryside and minor historical centres and villages in hinterlands or rural areas, are a new real opportunity. This scenario is also underlined by the recent pandemic crisis of COVID-19 (Boeri, 2020; Istituto di Architettura Montana, 2020; Koolhaas, 2020) and the climate change issues in cities (Cassar & Pender, 2003; Mercalli, 2020; Rosenzweig et al., 2011). All these aspects and future projects involve multidisciplinary knowledge and include many actors and stakeholders from different disciplines, application areas and domains. A great advantage could come from using a standard, unique, and shared language to reuse and integrate information and data in this framework. Therefore, ontologies are considered as an effective solution for the formal conceptualisation of a domain. They facilitate knowledge representation and semantic description of concepts with their attributes and relations. Sharing a shared understanding and exchanging information among different users is one of the central ontology's goals (Gruber, 1993; Musen, 1992).

In this sense, this thesis aims to lay the foundation for creating a common structure for sharing knowledge about historical centres in rural or urban areas. Hence, this PhD research has the ambition to create a spatial ontology for minor historical centres.