Cultural Heritage Survey: an Ontology Design Pattern

This paper introduces the Cultural Heritage Survey Ontology Design Pattern (CHS-ODP), a content pattern that abstracts from specific implementations and provides a reference core for modelling survey processes within cultural heritage knowledge graphs. The pattern is grounded in a set of generalised competency questions derived from two independent real-world use cases: a Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI)-based documentation campaign on rock art and a diagnostic investigation on illuminated manuscripts. Designed in alignment with CIDOC-CRM, ArCo, DOLCE UltraLight, the proposed pattern supports interoperable and reusable survey-centric modelling across heterogeneous cultural-heritage domains.