An Ontology Network for Citizen Curation

Citizen curation is gaining momentum as a new form of engagement with cultural heritage. Citizen curatorial activities require and produce a wealth of information, ranging from descriptions of the artefacts to visitor experience feedback. Although formalising and integrating such various data is of paramount importance, the domain lacks comprehensive ontologies to enable querying, interpreting and reasoning over the collected data. Social Participation, Cohesion and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement (SPICE) is an EU project dedicated to experimenting with citizen curation activities to foster cultural engagement. SPICE develops technologies that help communities to create and share their own interpretation of cultural artefacts, hence developing a better understanding of, and empathy for, themselves and other communities. Part of the SPICE ecosystem of technologies is the SPICE Ontology Network (SON), which empowers applications with knowledge-level reasoning abilities and supports both applications and users interacting with data involved in citizen curation activities. This article provides an overview of the SON and outlines its main use cases.