What is CDWA?
The Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) is a foundational framework for describing cultural heritage resources. This page describes work towards converting CDWA Lite (an XML schema based on CDWA "Core" Categories) into an ontology expressed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This work was originally presented at the 2009 iSchools Conference in Chapel Hill, NC.
Why OWL?
The OWL Web Ontology Language is a widely used W3C recommendation for expressing Semantic Web ontologies. OWL Description Logics (OWL-DL) was selected for this exercise because of its ability to more strongly model things such as:
- disjoint classes
- cardinality restrictions
- property relationship restrictions
Why not CIDOC CRM
The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model represents a leading ontology for the cultural heritage domain that has existing OWL and RDFS representations.
While the MuseumDAT project has demonstrated that CIDOC CRM can be successfully used to improve the CDWA Lite XML model, this exercise allows CDWA to speak for itself.
A future direction of this work is to fully map both CDWA Lite and CDWA to the CIDOC CRM ontology.
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