An ontology to describe the damage process to built cultural heritage triggered by earthquakes: The CHEDO model

Abstract

Information on cultural heritage is critical both to understand its value and to support management. Collecting, managing, visualizing, and sharing this information requires standardization. In the last decades, architecture has advanced in information management with the implementation of Building Information Modelling (BIM) methodology. The application of this methodology to cultural heritage has associated challenges due to the complexity and heterogeneity of the information. The integration of ontologies and BIM allows obtaining semantically enriched digital models, which has led to a growing interest in the field of architectural cultural heritage. In this article, the Cultural Heritage Earthquake Damage Ontology (CHEDO) model is presented. This ontology has been designed to document damage and loss caused by earthquakes in cultural heritage, through its integration into BIM systems interconnected with databases, although this integration is not addressed in the present work. The CHEDO model integrates terms and relationships to document the damage process in relation to the building characteristics (architectural, spatial, constructional, and geometrical) and the physical environment of the same. This model, by providing a comprehensive description of the building and its environment, allows for complete and accurate documentation of damage, which supports the planning of post-earthquake restoration and reconstruction. To facilitate interoperability with parallel ontologies in close domains of architectural cultural heritage, CHEDO was designed taking as reference the high-level ontology Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) developed by the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC), of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The proposed ontology is structured in four blocks: 'building and surrounding environment', to describe the building and its environment; 'building damage', to represent the damage and its causes; 'location', to describe the location of the building and the external processes; and 'terminology', to categorise and classify certain classes of the ontology.