CRMrp: An ontology to support the digital documentation of the conservation and restoration practice

• Restoration aims to guarantee legacy of artworks for future generations. • Digitisation and heterogeneous data archiving emerged as a crucial issue for practitioners. • A knowledge organisation system and an ontology are proposed to structure the documentation of the restoration process. • Use of CIDOC CRM, standards and national and international regulations. Restoration is the moment when a work of art is rediscovered and becomes part of its history. For this reason, the numerous data that usually accompany each intervention must be archived, structured, and shared among different practitioners in the domain of conservation of cultural heritage. This sector is moving towards a complete digitisation and then the generated information is wide, complex and heterogeneous: data are not only textual, such as restoration projects and reports, but also include diagnostic analysis results, photographs obtained by archaeometric investigations, photogrammetric datasets and 3D models, vector graphs and information related to the history of the considered artwork. The main aim of this research is to provide a sound methodology for the digital documentation of the restoration process. The contribution is twofold. On the one hand, a specific restoration knowledge organisation system has been defined to support data classification, based on international regulations and vocabularies. On the other hand, the CRMrp ontology has been realised, based on CIDOC CRM and specifically designed to represent all the restoration activities carried out on an artwork throughout its life cycle.