Supporting Semantic Interoperability in Conservation-Restoration Domain: The PARCOURS Project

Cheikh Niang, Claudia Marinica, Béatrice Bouchou-Markhoff, Elise Leboucher, Olivier Malavergne, Luc Bouiller, Claude Darrieumerlou, Francois Laissus

Abstract: In this article, we present a semantic-based approach for dealing with the interoperability issue in the conservation-restoration domain. We first evaluate the context and our observations confirm the critical need for a data integration system taking advantage of data semantics. Our solution consists in: (1) building a domain-specific ontology, to rely on a unified understanding of the conservation-restoration data; (2) mapping the shared ontology to each data source, allowing each participating source to manage its own semantic database, consisting of its original data now associated to the semantic level; and (3) integrating all sources’ data, for querying them in the same homogeneous way. The presented achievements have been conducted as part of the PARCOURS project, whose aim is to develop an information system able to provide a unified access to distinct information sources, related to the cultural heritage field in general and the conservation-restoration processes in particular.