Theoretical Model

A theoretical model helps structure and connect cultural heritage entities by describing relationships between elements - that describe them - using natural language. Predicates are essential because they give meaning to the data, allowing us to express complex relationships in a precise and standardized way.

The Japanese Tea Ceremony is a richly interconnected domain involving aesthetics, philosophy, objects, and social practices. Our theoretical model captures these connections using predicates linking people, texts, artifacts, and concepts. This model helps represent how our domain influences and is influenced by art, architecture, and ideas like wabi-sabi and Zen, both historically and in contemporary life.

Conceptual Model

Building on our theoretical model, we attempted to define natural language based representation into a formal one, by applying formal vocabularies to classes and properties. The ontology schemas were decided based on the type of item and the metadata standards in which they were described. For cultural heritage items from museums, CIDOC-CRM and EDM were adopted as a primary schema. For literary works, we followed BIBFRAME. For general terms and relations, widely used schemas such as Dublin Core, SKOS, FOAF were adopted. The relations represented include general infomation regarding the items, as well as people, activities, and concepts closely related to the Japanese Tea Ceremony.