# A Framework for the Evaluation of the Cultural Heritage Information Ontology
###### Abstract  
The intelligent management of built cultural heritage, including heritage buildings, requires common semantics in the form of standardized ontologies to achieve semantic interoperability. Foundational ontologies should be reused when building new ontologies, as they provide high-level terms; however, candidate foundational ontologies should be evaluated for quality and pitfalls. Simple metrics (e.g., number of concepts) are easy to obtain with existing tools. Complex metrics such as quality of ontology structure, functional adequacy, transferability, reliability, compatibility, maintainability, and operability, are defined in recent ontology evaluation frameworks; however, these do not evaluate interoperability features. The paper proposes an improved framework for an automated ontology evaluation based on the OQuaRE framework. Our approach improved some of the metrics of the OQuaRE framework and introduced three metrics for assessing the interoperability of the ontology in question (Externes, Composability, and Aggregability). In the experimental section, the framework is validated in an evaluation of cultural heritage information ontology (CIDOC CRM--ISO 12217:2014) with the use of new software for ontology evaluation. The detailed results reveal that the ontology is minimally acceptable and that the improved evaluation framework efficiently integrated interoperability metrics. Recommendations for the improvement of the cultural heritage information ontology are described in the Discussion and Conclusions section. ontology evaluation; interoperability metrics; cultural heritage; heritage buildings 2022  
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and applications of knowledge engineering on the growing number of BIM models for existing buildings. The conversion of BIM models to a web ontology language (OWL) representation of the industry foundation classes (IFC) schema, ifcOWL [11], upgrades them to building knowledge models. The link between heritage buildings (HB) and BIM is highlighted in recent research literature focused primarily on sustainable retrofitting [12; 13; 14; 15; 16] and on-site interventions [17; 18; 19]. Historical buildings, part of tangible heritage, and built cultural heritage are of interest for domain experts in culture, management, tourism, sociology, and natural sciences (e.g., biology), all of which contribute knowledge to tasks connected to their rehabilitation, including interventions such as:  
* Preservation: The Burra Charter [20] defines preservation as the maintenance of a building in its current state, retarding deterioration. Aimed at fixing the current state of the building, minor repairs, adjustments, and improvements can be listed as examples of preservation. * Restoration means \"returning a place to a known earlier state by removing accretions or by reassembling existing elements without the introduction of new material\" [20]. It is important to note that, according to the Burra Charter, \"place\" has a broad scope and includes natural and cultural features, such as individual buildings or groups of buildings. According to the CEN EN 15898 (Conservation of Cultural Property--Main General Terms and Definitions), restoration interventions are \"actions applied to a stable or stabilized object aimed at facilitating its appreciation, understanding, and/or use, while respecting its significance and the materials and techniques used\". * Renovation focuses on building appearance and tenant facilities. Retrofitting can also be considered as renovation targeted at the improvement of energy and water efficiency--sustainable retrofitting [13]. * Remodeling establishes a new function within a building, which may imply substantial modifications [21]. Often, the information exchanged between experts does not have a clear formal meaning [22], rendering it semantically non-interoperable. A knowledge modelling approach, connected to ontologies, provides a way to include across and between domain semantics, which is necessary for establishing connections and formally defining concepts.