# Ontology-Driven Cultural Heritage Conservation: A Case of _The Anales of Confucius_
## 4 State of the Art  
This chapter will present some current work about ontology and its application in cultural heritage. A general introduction of ontology and ontology building methodologies is to be made initially. Then we are going to take some examples to show how ontology is applied in cultural heritage conservation. In the last part, standards and models available will be introduced. Ontology originated in philosophy and extended to other fields with the rapid development of computer science. After [PERSON] et al. proposed the definition of ontology in artificial intelligence [12], its definition was expanded and refined to the point where it is now the most common definition which is \"an ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization\" including four layers of meaning: conceptual model, explicit specification, formal, and shared [13; 14]. Ontology construction is a systematic engineering, but there is no absolutely correct methodology for developing ontologies. The characteristic of domain knowledge is also a key factor to be considered during ontology design. Nonetheless, ontology construction still follows certain basic steps. There are various methods to develop a domain ontology, including Skeletal Methodology [15], IDEF5 [16], TOVE [17], SENSUS [18], and so on. The Ontology Development 101 [19] method developed by Stanford University School of Medicine is the most mature and widely used ontology development method at present. Ontology has a wide range of application scenarios in the domain of cultural heritage and could be used in different stages in cultural heritage protection. Ontology for capturing and processing 3D cultural heritage objects could enhance the operability of 3D scanning and the control of data quality [20]. [PERSON] et al. proposed Holy-Land ontology, which attempts to encode knowledge about Palestine's cultural heritage, aiming to provide multi-language semantic retrieval support for their cultural heritage system [21]. Compared to tangible cultural heritage, ICH is abstract and requires more detailed consideration in ontology design. Correspondingly, an appropriate ontology model can be of great benefit in representing abstract transactions. Ontology of Terengganu Brassware Craft completely records the knowledge about this craft and the process of constructing it presenting the experience in developing a domain ontology for ICH [22]. Similarly, ontology-based knowledge and understanding obtained from experts and knowledgeable members improved the inheritance of culture [23]. By building ontologies beforehand, entities and relationships \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**CQ** & **Competency Questions** & **Class** & **Relation** \\ \hline
1 & What are the Chinese terms of concept and their equivalents in English? & Concept & Rdfs:subClassOf, skos:prefLabel \\
2 & What are the concepts that express character? & Concept, Character & Rdfs:subClassOf \\
3 & What are the definitions of the “filiality” in English and Chinese? & Concept, Filiality & Rdfs:subClassOf, skos:definition \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: The three competency questions. could be extracted from the structured or unstructured text about ICH [24; 25]. In some cases, existing ontologies can be reused to organize and classify new cultural heritage data collection. The degree of reuse depends on what class and properties those ontologies have. As for an example of representing an idea system with ontology, we have not yet found one, although there are not many studies that introduce ontology into ICH. The digitization of the ICH is much more complicated than the general cultural heritage; thus, it requires the extension of the standard ontology for digitization of cultural heritage [26]. For this reason, it would be helpful to reference some public resources when developing a specific domain ontology of ICH.