ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore how computational ontologies make the process of accessing, controlling, and disseminating knowledge feasible in the cultural heritage sector. This chapter is divided into three major sections. The first explains what Ontology Engineering is and how to extract ontologies from unstructured texts (Ontology Learning). Specifically, we analyse the extraction and population of ontologies by applying natural language analysis techniques to texts. The second section presents current research in ontology learning applied to the cultural heritage sector. We show concrete examples of available ontologies for museums, ontologies that have been developed for describing museum artefacts and objects, quantitative analyses of the art market using ontologies, web ontologies for modelling art collections, and new methods to provide personalized tour recommendation for museum visits. In the last section, we will take a case study to illustrate the utility of ontologies in preserving and disseminating cultural heritage.
