Art and Architectural Argumentation Ontology (AAAo)

Currently available in English only

AAAo, the Art and Architectural Argumentation Ontology, is a tool expressly built to support historians in accurately documenting and tracing the historical evolutions of social situations in an enriched semantic data format. In order to document and explore historical facts in a sustainable and data-driven environment, researchers need an extensible set of concepts and categories, an ontology, that enables them to express the facts that matter to them. At first, this may seem to pose an insurmountable problem; historical research is, by its nature, an open domain, capable of potentially unlimited subject matter. But, if we consider the overall kinds of facts that historical research needs to be able to accurately record and recall, we arrive at a more general idea of what is required. On the one hand, there are events and their parameters and, on the other, the evolution of social and cultural forms as initiated by, maintained through or ended by such events. For example, we can think of events of acquisition of ownership or of marriage which lead to new social situations of ownership or family relation respectively. Likewise, new agreements or basic events can alter these social situations: new ownership agreements, thefts or, on the side of marriage, infidelity, divorce. AAAo offers the basic representative tools to meet these two basic data representation needs. It achieves this goal by extending the event-centered logic of the CIDOC CRM (International Council of Documentation Conceptual Reference Model), with a social, fact-centric logic for describing facts of social agreement that arise and disappear by convention. The ontology provides a rich set of modelling constructs that account for a broad selection of commonly documented historical facts, such as socially contextualized family and social relations, social status, rights status, and obligation - constructs that have proven to be challenging to existing ontologies in the cultural heritage domain. The social fact centered logic AAAo introduces may furthermore be extended to cover areas of interest beyond its original modelling scope, in a coherent and logically consequent fashion. AAAo was designed through the analysis of a wide set of historical documentation and comes with a rich set of practical examples of its application in this domain. Under the aegis of SARI, there is an ongoing commitment to its maintenance and enrichment through dialogue with the user community. It is maintained publicly in the OntoMe ontology development repository, and stable versions are stored on GitHub. 

Consult the github repository for stable versions and documentation: https://github.com/swiss-art-research-net/aaao

Consult the OntoMe site to follow the evolution of the development of the standard:https://ontome.net/namespace/336

AAAo was developed by Takin Solutions on behalf of gta Digital/ETH Zürich and the Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI) and has been generously funded by the Chair for History and Theory of Architecture (ETH Zurich). Its formalisation and publication have been generously funded by swissuniversities and as part of the Open Research Data (ORD) programme (Project Open Research for the Arts, ORDEA).