A Framework for Semantic Interoperability in 3D Tangible Cultural Heritage in Taiwan

Cultural heritage (CH) preservation and management play vital roles in conserving valuable properties and facilitating relevant historical studies on a country. The advanced technologies developed for CH preservation and management in recent years have made CH digitalization and documentation easy and have generated tremendous amounts of data for a wide range of applications. However, a great focus remains on the large amount of CH data, particularly on CH semantic interoperability, because various standards or schemas are applied during data generation. To achieve 3D CH semantic interoperability, this study proposes and comprehensively discusses an ontology-based approach for 3D tangible CH that includes 3D models, metadata, and their restoration information in the entire life cycle of the building information model (BIM). A tangible cultural heritage ontology is developed based on a top-level ontology, namely, the CIDOC conceptual reference model (CRM), for heritage information, metadata, and restoration. Access is achieved by mapping from the designated heritage in the national cultural heritage database with DC-based metadata to CIDOC CRM and from an enriched Heritage BIM with restoration information encoded as industry foundation classes (IFC) ontology to CIDOC CRM. The proposed framework can successfully combine a 3D model and its enriched information and is available for 3D model semantic accessing and integration. We focus on the discussion of Taiwan’s traditional Southern Fujian architecture.