Modeling cultural heritage knowledge in urban tourism through curiocity ontology

Abstract

Cultural heritage has the potential to tell a story, to be and to become the legacy of a society. The elements that constitute this heritage are related to each other, in addition to other elements such as its artisans and creators, its source material, and others of an abstract nature such as its utility or appraisal. Cultural heritage also has the potential to define a period of time because of the characteristics that its elements share. These relationships create a complex semantic network, representing the knowledge of this domain, which in turn, can be extended to other organizations. The formal modeling of knowledge in the form of ontologies has allowed the preservation and standardization of cultural heritage knowledge, in addition to its own objectives such as the exchange and reuse of this information. However, there is a wide variety of objectives that authors pursue in the design of an ontology, generally starting from some standard, to adapt and optimally capture the characteristics of each type of heritage, which are influenced by variables such as the social aspects of each country, technological requirements, or due adaptation to the end user. Urban tourism also extends the concept of cultural heritage, incorporating the visitors’ interests within the environment of a city. In this context, this work seeks to model the knowledge of urban tourist centers through technological standards and the experience of existing ontologies of museums; and to propose a categorization of the knowledge of cultural heritage from the opinion of a world entity such as UNESCO. As a result of the modeling, an ontology will be developed, which will be validated qualitatively and quantitatively; and tested in the implementation of a service framework that will support a variety of applications, among these, a system of tourist guide robots.