ArCo ontology network and LOD on Italian Cultural Heritage

ArCo (Architecture of Knowledge) is a collaborative project that involves the institute of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage ICCD (Institute of Catalogue and Documentation) and the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of CNR (Italian National Research Council). ArCo aims at modelling the wide domain of Italian cultural heritage for two main purposes: (i) building a network of ontologies, compatible and aligned whenever possible with existing ontologies, that can be used as a de facto standard for representing cultural heritage data; (ii) publishing ICCD data as LOD: about 800.000 publishable files stored in the ICCD General Catalogue database. In this paper, we present ArCo structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and we delineate its importance, quality, and impact in using semantic technologies in the fruition of Cultural Heritage.