An ontology for legacy data on ancient ceramics of the plain of Catania

Digital representation and organization of legacy data plays a crucial role in the diffusion, use, and understanding of data stored in old publications, archives, and museums. An interesting case study comes from data of potteries discovered in ancient rural territories of Eastern Sicily, as the majority of legacy data for this research area exists in the form of old maps and paper catalogues: to make these datasets available at a global level, innovative digital technologies are needed. The Semantic Web offers well established methodologies and tools to semantically model application domains and to integrate data, making them global entities available on the Web. In this contribution, we present OntoCeramic 2.0, an OWL 2 (Web Ontology Language 2) ontology storing archaeological data from the plain of Catania regarding ancient potteries, and whose taxonomy refines and extends OntoCeramic 1.0, an ontology for the classification of ancient ceramics defined in a previous work by some of the authors. OntoCeramic 2.0, constructed according to the standard CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), represents and integrates new survey and legacy data on ancient pottery stored in the archives of Heritage Superintendence of Syracuse and Catania, in the Regional Technical Office of Sicily, and in the State Archives of Palermo and Catania.