An Ontology for Cultural Heritage Protection against Climate Change

Environmental factors, worsened by the increasing climate change impact, represent significant threats to European Cultural Heritage (CH) assets. In Europe, the huge number and diversity of CH assets, together with the different climatological sub-regions aspects, as well as the different adaptation policies to climate change adopted (or to be adopted) by the different nations, generate a very complex scenario. This paper will present a multidisciplinary methodology that will bridge the gap between two different worlds: the CH stakeholders and the scientific/technological experts. Since protecting cultural heritage assets and increasing their resilience against effects caused by the climate change is a multidisciplinary task, experts from many domains need to work together to meet their conservation goals. This paper discusses a method for facilitating the work for the different experts. A new ontology has been designed integrating all necessary aspects for improving the resilience of cultural heritages on site. This ontology combines the following topics: Cultural Heritage Assets, Stakeholders and Roles, Climate and Weather Effects, Risk Management, Conservation Actions, Materials, Sensors, Models and Observations, Standard Operation Procedures/Workflows and Damages.