Ontology-based Modeling and Visualization of Cultural Spatio-temporal Knowledge

Geographic knowledge is essential in handling a large variety of resources, including cultural contents such as museum artifacts, maps, books, photographs, and videos. The metadata of such resources often need to refer to a geographic entity or region, for example to the place where an artifact was produced, used, or found. In this paper, we examine how geographical knowledge may be represented ontologically to enable different types of searches, visualization, and inference in cultural semantic portals and other semantic geo-applications. In particular, we show how change in time between historical regions can be explicated as an ontology and be used for reasoning. Regarding search and visualization, we show how maps of different time periods can be visualized as transparent overlays on top of Google Maps, how cultural content can be visualized on them, how geo-based queries can be formulated based on maps, and how additional services, such as a meta-search system, can be integrated in the mash-up system. The work presented is being integrated at the practical level in the cultural semantic cross-domain portal CultureSampo.