A Graded Model of Semantic Commitment for Curated Cultural Heritage Data Integration

Abstract

This paper presents a semantic hypermedia framework for documenting and interpreting cultural heritage artifacts, with particular attention to decontextualized and refunctionalized architectural components, through curated integration of heterogeneous sources. Built on Linked Open Data principles, it addresses two key challenges: mediating semantic complexity for domain experts, and ensuring data quality when integrating external resources. Knowledge patterns map CIDOC-CRM to a project-specific model aligned with scholarly practice, while external datasets—such as the Getty vocabularies, OpenStreetMap, Zotero, and Iconclass—are incorporated through a graded model of semantic commitment, distinguishing authority alignment, partial reuse, and full ontology adoption. External information is materialized in a knowledge graph to ensure reproducibility and long-term accessibility. By framing external linking and semantic mediation as a hypermedia design problem, the approach shows how controlled integration can support navigation, enrichment, and scholarly reuse of cultural heritage data while preserving curatorial control. We contribute a practical model for dataset curation, semantic mediation, and graph-based knowledge representation in cultural heritage hypermedia systems, developed through the design and implementation of a case study.