arXiv:1709.02618v4 [] 18 Sep 2017

The Shape of a Benedictine Monastery:
The SaintGall Ontology
(Extended Version)
Claudia Cantale, a Domenico Cantone, b Manuela Lupica Rinato, c
Marianna Nicolosi-Asmundo, b and Daniele Francesco Santamaria b
a Dept. of Humanities, University of Catania, Italy
b Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, Italy
c Officine Culturali, Catania, Italy
Abstract. We present an OWL 2 ontology representing the Saint Gall plan, one of
the most ancient documents arrived intact to us, which describes the ideal model of
a Benedictine monastic complex that inspired the design of many European monasteries.
Keywords. Ontology, OWL 2, Digital Humanities, Benedictine Monasteries.

1. Introduction
Monasteries are conceived by the Benedictine monastic order, founded by Saint Benedict
of Nursia, during the last period of the Western Roman Empire. The monastic shape aims
preserving the European Christianity inside small self-sustaining communities where to
lead a life of mystic and religious contemplation and introspection.1 The main principle
is to protect and shield Christian religion and tradition from barbarian invasions.
Monasteries differ from convents primarily because of their purpose. Monasteries
are inhabited by monks belonging to some monastic order such as the Benedictine one,
having an ascetic and solitary lifestyle. Convents, originated later with the mendicant
orders, such as the Franciscan one, are more dependent by the outside world. The two
religious constructions arise in different historical periods carrying out different functions inside the religious community. Starting from the VII century, Western Europe is
characterized by a capillary network of monasteries. Their shape in Occident remained
largely unchanged in its characteristics during the whole Middle Age and in all Christian
countries.
Monasteries are often also abbeys that are spaces where the nullius diocesis is effective. Such norm, in the canon law, represents the independence of a church and of the
1 «Monasticism has its root in the interpretation of the Christian faith developed in the theology of the VI
century firstly in Orient. Analogously to theology and architecture, it is subjected to a deep transformation
in Occident. [ ... ] The Benedictine Order remains for a long time the principal one. Hundreds of convents
and monasteries are spread across the Christian Europe and represent cells of Christian tradition and faith, of
science, and of culture» [10].

Figure 1. The plan of Saint Gall.

related monastery from the diocese in which the building is located. Therefore, the abbot
substitutes for the bishop inside the Benedictine “village”.
Strongly inspired by the rule of Saint Benedict, the plan of St. Gall, illustrated in Figure 1, is a model of monastery better representing the Benedictine architecture.2 Founded
in the context of Pre-Romanesque Carolingian art and architecture, in which a varied
partition of the space is preferred, it can be considered a fixed-type for the Middle Age
monasteries [8]. Moreover, being one of the most ancient descriptions of primitive Benedictine monastery arrived intact today, it turns out to be an important structural, architectonic, and functional landmark for the Benedictine monasteries. In the plan, St. Gall
monastery is idealized together with its essential components. In fact, as it often happens in the context of architectural history, buildings realized in a long temporal window
are subject to change with respect to the original idea because of historical, economical,
practical, and morphological reasons. Many European monasteries are inspired by the
St. Gall plan even if for practical and technical reasons they deviate from it. For instance,
Catania’s Benedictine Monastery [1,7] contains most of the elements of the St. Gall plan
with the exception of some locations such as the brewery that, for cultural reasons, is replaced by a distillery. Moreover, Catania’s Benedictine Monastery is a urban monastery
and therefore the structure of the animal farms is also slightly modified.
In this paper we present an OWL 2 ontology, called SaintGall Ontology, representing
the monastery described in the St. Gall plan. SaintGall Ontology has been developed
by taking into account structural, architectonic, and functional details of the buildings
included in the plan, and information provided by [8,10,11,13]. It consists of more than
400 classes, almost 60 object properties, and more than 1000 logical axioms. It exploits
OWL 2 constructs such as existential restriction and qualified cardinality restriction, and
has been classified using the Fact++ reasoner.
2 http://www.stgallplan.org/

2. The Ontology of St. Gall plan
The SaintGall Ontology3 describes buildings and green spaces depicted in the plan of
Saint Gall considering their cardinal orientation, their position with respect to other entities inside the plan, and their architectonic, structural, and functional features.
The ontology exploits the following main classes. The class Building describes a
generic building, Garden specifies a generic green space, Element describes architectonic elements, natural elements, furnitures, spaces contained in the plan. The ontology
also provides classes and properties to describe the cardinal orientation, position, and
shape of the structures of the plan, and the role of people living inside the monastery.
At first we model the functional areas of the monastery classifying the buildings
represented on the map according to their intended use. Specifically, we introduce
as subclasses of Building the pairwise disjoint classes BuildingForEducation,
BuildingForHospitality, BuildingForTheSickAndInfirm, FarmBuilding,
PrincipalMonasticBuilding.
BuildingForEducation includes, in particular, the class School, modeling
a building intended for the education of scholars, and the class NoviceCloister,
representing the novice cloister, dwelling of young people oriented to the
monastic life. BuildingForHospitality contains among others the class
HospitiumDistingueshedGuests, modeling the hospitium for the reception of eminent strangers, and the class HospitiumPoorTravelersPilgrims, representing the
dwelling of poor travelers and pilgrims. The class BuildingForTheSickAndInfirm
contains in particular the subclass InfirmaryCloister, representing the cloister
where the sick brethren are lodged, and the class DoctorHouse, containing among
others a private room for the physician and a room for very ill patients. The class
FarmBuilding models the factory, the working house, and other buildings devoted to
domestic cattle, poultry, and their keepers. The class PrincipalMonasticBuilding
includes in particular the classes AbbotHouse, modeling the dwelling of the abbot,
TheCloister, describing the cloister where monks live, and TheChurch, describing
the abbey. The hierarchy of Building is shown in Figure 2.
The green spaces inside the monastery are modeled by means of the
class Garden, having the disjoint subclasses Cemetery, KitchenGarden, and
PhysicGarden. Cardinal orientation of buildings and gardens on the map are
modeled by the classes CardinalDirection, CentralPosition, and the objectproperty hasPosition, having as range the union of CardinalDirection and
CentralPosition. CardinalDirection is a finite enumeration of the values
East, North, NorthEast, NorthWest, South, SouthEast, SouthWest, West.
CentralPosition contains only the individual Centre. In addition, we introduced the defined classes CentralArea, EastArea, NorthArea, NorthEastArea,
NorthWestArea, WestArea, SouthEastArea, SouthWestArea, SouthArea, whose
subclasses, representing the buildings and gardens of the monastery, are deduced by inference. Figure 3 shows the description of the class NorthArea, while Figure 4 illustrates
the inferred hierarchy of NorthArea.
In addition, we define the position of buildings or gardens in the map with respect
to other contiguous buildings or gardens, by means of the object-properties onEastOf,
3 https://goo.gl/XN2hc3

Figure 2. Subclass hierarchy of Building.

Figure 3. Description of NorthArea.

Figure 4. Inferred hierarchy of NorthArea.

Figure 5. Subclass hierarchy of Shape.

onNorthEastOf, onNorthOf, onNorthWestOf, onSouthEastOf, onSouthOf,
onSouthWestOf, onWestOf, where onEastOf is the inverse of onWestOf, onNorthOf
of onSouthOf, onNorthWestOf of onSouthEastOf, and onNorthEastOf of
onSouthWestOf.
Next we analyze the shape, the size, and the internal structure of buildings and gardens. 4 We define the class Shape, modeling the shape of structures, and whose subclass
hierarchy is shown in Figure 5, and the object-property hasShape. The class Size and
the object-property hasSize model the size of buildings. Buildings in the map having
the same size are associated to equivalent subclasses of the class Size.
4 We take into account the information provided by our available sources, namely [13,8,9,11,10] and
http://www.stgallplan.org/.

Figure 6. Subclass hierarchy of Element.

Figure 7. Object-properties related to the class Element.

Figure 8. Description of AbbotHouse.

The class Element has as subclasses the class ArchitecturalElement, describing
general architectural elements inside the map, the class Forniture, modeling objects
used in everyday life such as Bedstand and Desk, the class Tool, modeling tools of
common use such as Furnace and Boiler, and classes describing rooms, clothes, food,
votive, and ornamental elements. Anything included in such classes can be used in other
contexts outside the Saint Gall plan.

Figure 9. The class TheCloister.

In addition, we provide the object-properties contains, together with its subproperties consistOf, containsAround, and so on, and its inverse isContainedIn, together with its subproperties isPartOf, isContainedAround, and so on. The hierarchy
of subclasses of Element and of their related properties are illustrated in Figure 6 and 7.
In Figure 8 we show our representation of the abbot house.
This building, inhabited by the abbot, is surrounded by a fence. It consists of two
stories of which the lower one has an open portico on the east and west sides. The inner
space is split into two chambers: the abbot sleeping and sitting rooms. The upper story
contains some small chambers and one large chamber. Details concerning the furniture
of the abbot sleeping and sitting rooms are modeled by the classes AbbotSleepingRoom
and AbbotSittingRoom, respectively, which are subclasses of Chamber. Our representation of the monk cloister can be found in Figure 9.
We also modeled people living in the monastery. As shown in Figure 10, they are
classified according to the place in which they live and spend most of the day.

Figure 10. Description of Abbot.

3. Conclusions
We presented an ontology for the Saint Gall plan, that describes the ideal model of the
structure of a monastic Benedictine building. The plan allows one to study the most significant features of European monastic buildings such as the Monastery of San Nicolò
l’Arena in Catania, the Abbey of Santa Giustina in Padua, the Cluny Abbey, the Montecassino Abbey [8]. By means of SaintGall Ontology, scholars and researchers in Human
Science can effectively compare several distinct monastic architectures, and from their
differences and similarities make inferences not only in the architectonic and stylistic
ambits but also in the interpretative and theological areas [11].
We are currently considering the integration of the SaintGall Ontology with the ontology for the Benedictine Monastery of Catania presented in [2] and other widespread
ontologies for cultural heritage such as as CIDOC-CRM.5 Some generic classes from
the SaintGall Ontology, such as Church and Cloister, can be reused to design novel
ontologies describing buildings outside the Benedectine context. Consider, for instance,
the architectonic structure of closed garden (cloister or court), which can be also found
in municipal buildings.
The SaintGall Ontology was designed in such a way as to describe the SaintGall
map in detail. That makes it more complex than both the ontology of the Monastery of
Catania [2] and Ontoceramic [6], an ontology for the classification of pottery. Moreover,
the SaintGall Ontology cannot be represented in the set-theoretic fragment considered
5 http://www.cidoc-crm.org

in [3], used in recent work by some of the authors for ontologies representation and
reasoning. Thus, we intend to design a new decidable set-theoretic fragment admitting
the composition operator allowing one to represent and reason on the SaintGall Ontology.
Results in [4,5] are helpful to construct an appropriate decision procedure for such settheoretic fragment.

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