ArCo: a Knowledge Graph of Italian Cultural Heritage

Dear all,

we are very proud to announce the upcoming release of ArCo (Architecture of Knowledge): an ontology for, and a knowledge graph of, Italian Cultural Heritage. 

ArCo is developed in collaboration by ICCD – MiBAC (Italian Institute for Catalogue and Documentation of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities) and STLab, ISTC-CNR( Semantic Technology Laboratory of Italian National Research Council).

ArCo’s first stable version will be release on April on MiBAC’s official portal [1]. However, ArCo is already available as an ‘unstable’ resource (v0.5 alpha) at [2] or [3].

Currently, ArCo knowledge graph consists of a network of ontologies featuring 293 classes and 469 properties, and a dataset of ~173M triples  (data from ~800.000 catalogue records of Italian cultural heritage entities).

You can download ArCo’s docker from its Github project at [3] and have everything on your own PC. You are welcome to help us improving ArCo by submitting issues through Github.
You are welcome to play with ArCo’s SPARQL endpoint [4]
You’ll find sample queries and other useful documentation at [5]

Below you find some details about ArCo model and data.

Best regards,
Valentina Presutti on behalf of ArCo team

[1] http://dati.beniculturali.it/ <http://dati.beniculturali.it/> 
[2] http://wit.istc.cnr.it/arco/index.php?lang=en <http://wit.istc.cnr.it/arco/index.php?lang=en>
[3] https://github.com/ICCD-MiBACT/ArCo <https://github.com/ICCD-MiBACT/ArCo>
[4] http://wit.istc.cnr.it/arco/virtuoso/sparql <http://wit.istc.cnr.it/arco/virtuoso/sparql>
[5] http://wit.istc.cnr.it/arco/?lang=en#esempi <http://wit.istc.cnr.it/arco/?lang=en#esempi>
[6] http://www.iccd.beniculturali.it/it/per-consultare <http://www.iccd.beniculturali.it/it/per-consultare> 

Some details about ArCo:

ArCo ontologies model a plethora of types of cultural properties such as archeological objects, numismatic objects, artistic heritage, musical instruments, photographs, technological heritage, etc., to name a few. For these objects it allows to capture details such as elements affixed on cultural properties (e.g. coat of arms), the coin issuance of a numismatic property, copies, forgeries and other works related to a cultural property, specific surveys (such as a paleopathology diagnosis on an anthropological material), cadastral information, historical locations, the communication medium (e.g. kinesic, instrumental) of intangible demo-ethno-anthropological heritage, etc.

ArCo reuses and is aligned to CIDOC-CRM, EDM, Cultural-ON, OntoPiA, and other alignments and linking are planned for the future (e.g.: BIBFRAME, EAC-CPF, DBpedia, Wikidata, Getty Vocabularies).

ArCo’s starting point is the General Catalogue of Cultural Heritage [6], a database collecting ~800.000 catalogue records of Italian cultural heritage entities.
This enormous amount of data is now available as a LOD knowledge graph!