HiCo, Historical Context Ontology Documentation

HiCO is an OWL 2 DL ontology for describing historical context of cultural heritage objects. Cultural heritage object is a wide concept, including any sort of representation of culture heritage embodied in a tangible form - like artifacts: books, documents, works of art - and any concept, assertion, interpretation bounded to them. Furthermore, any other object stating assertions about a cultural object of interest could be considered as a cultural heritage object itself. E.g. dealing with a critical edition of a text embodied in a TEI document, we have two cultural heritage objects, the original text and the critical edition. These elements are fully described with FRBR model. Historical context involves primarily aspects explicitly described in an object of interest - like a description of an event in a document - but also recognized as implicit - like a citation of art styles in a paint - or even any information coming from other objects - like the agreement of an author with a particular artistic movement or a previous situation not mentioned in a document, maybe described somewhere else - which are all useful elements in order to clearly understand the content of the object of interest. All these sort of information are meaningfully part of the context of a cultural object and could be considered bounded to the object itself through a particular situation, i.e. an interpretation. HiCO, using referenced models like SPAR ontologies and a set of properties from PROV-O ontology, aims to describe these issues.