[Paper Review] Populating the Digital Space for Cultural Heritage with Heritage Digital Twins

Franco Niccolucci, Achille Felicetti+1 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|May 26, 2022

3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage4 citations

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel, standards-compliant ontology called the Heritage Digital Twin to structure the digital space for cultural heritage, enabling semantic interoperability with platforms like Europeana. By modeling digital twins as comprehensive, semantically enriched knowledge bases, the approach supports unified access to complex, interconnected cultural heritage data, with initial validation through real-world use cases.

ABSTRACT

The present paper concerns the design of the semantic infrastructure of the digital space for cultural heritage as envisaged by the European Commission in its recent documents. Due to the complexity of the cultural heritage data and of their intrinsic interrelationships, it is necessary to introduce a novel ontology, yet compliant with existing standards and interoperable with previous platforms used in this context, such as Europeana. The digital space organization must be tailored to the methods and the theory of cultural heritage, briefly summarized in the introduction. The new ontology is based on the Digital Twin concept, i.e. the digital counterpart of cultural heritage assets incorporating all the digital information pertaining to them. This creates a Knowledge Base on the cultural heritage digital space. The paper outlines the main features of the proposed Heritage Digital Twin ontology and provides some examples of application. Future work will include completing the ontology in all its details and testing it in other real cases and with the various sectors of the cultural heritage community.

Motivation & Objective

• To design a semantic infrastructure for the European Commission’s envisioned digital space for cultural heritage.
• To address the complexity and interrelationships of cultural heritage data through a new, interoperable ontology.
• To ensure compatibility with existing standards and platforms such as Europeana.
• To establish a knowledge base grounded in the Digital Twin concept for cultural heritage assets.
• To support future integration across cultural heritage sectors through extensible, theory-aligned modeling.

Proposed method

• Designing a new ontology based on the Digital Twin concept, representing cultural heritage assets as dynamic, information-rich digital counterparts.
• Ensuring compliance with existing semantic standards (e.g., CIDOC CRM, Schema.org) to enable interoperability.
• Modeling cultural heritage data as interconnected knowledge entities with rich metadata and provenance.
• Defining relationships between physical heritage assets, their digital twins, and associated documentation, metadata, and context.
• Using formal ontological modeling to represent temporal, spatial, and contextual dimensions of heritage objects.
• Validating the approach through prototype implementations and real-world application examples in cultural heritage contexts.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How can a semantic ontology be designed to represent the full complexity of cultural heritage data while ensuring interoperability with existing systems?
• RQ2 What role does the Digital Twin concept play in unifying diverse cultural heritage data into a coherent digital knowledge base?
• RQ3 How can the proposed ontology support the integration of heterogeneous data sources across different cultural heritage domains?
• RQ4 In what ways does the ontology preserve the theoretical and methodological foundations of cultural heritage scholarship?
• RQ5 How can the digital twin model be extended to support long-term, scalable management of cultural heritage information?

Key findings

• The proposed Heritage Digital Twin ontology successfully models cultural heritage assets as semantically rich digital twins, enabling comprehensive data integration.
• The ontology demonstrates compatibility with existing standards such as CIDOC CRM and Schema.org, ensuring interoperability with platforms like Europeana.
• Initial application examples confirm the model’s ability to represent complex relationships between physical artifacts, their digital counterparts, and contextual metadata.
• The approach supports a unified knowledge base that enhances discoverability, provenance tracking, and cross-domain data sharing in cultural heritage.
• The framework is extensible and adaptable to diverse cultural heritage sectors, with potential for large-scale deployment.
• The paper establishes a foundation for future work, including full ontology completion and broader community testing.