The MONDIS project Semantic Web and the protection of historic buildings

The flexibility of Semantic Web ontologies in knowledge mapping and sharing has induced in the last few years professionals and researchers to study their application to various fields of knowledge, including among others flight control and hospital management systems. This paper reviews the applicatibility of ontologies to the domain of cultural heritage protection, outling the main findings of the MONDIS research project. More specifically it outlines the knowledge-based tools, grounded on an ontological representation of the field of heritage conservation, including: the MONDIS mobile application, the ontomind profiles, the MONDIS record explorer, the knowledge matrix and the terminology editor. These tools can be divided into two groups: inputting tools, including the mobile application and ontomind profiles, and visualization tools, such as the record explorer, the knowledge matrix and the terminology editor. Such a comprehensive range of applications opens to the standardization and management of a heterogeneous set of data facilitating the integration of exisitng information systems into the presented one. Finally the paper discusses the main advantage of the ontological approach as applied to historic building inspection and damage identification, highlighting how an ontological data mapping can ensure the information compatibility for automatic data reasoning and processing required for advanced searching and data matching purposes. The advancement of the MONDIS research in the context of cultural heritage protection and the possibility for future developments of the system are also discussed in the paper.