GEOHERITAGE AND GEOSITE DATA REPRESENTATION: AN ONTOLOGY DRIVEN PERSPECTIVE

Geoheritage is recognized by UNESCO as part of the (natural) cultural heritage. It is the part related to the history of the Earth, and a representation on how the processes acted (and act) to change our planet. The tangible and intangible characteristics of cultural heritage also apply to geoheritage: the tangible features are the rocks, the landforms, the water bodies, and all that appears on the Earth surface; the intangible features are the processes and the events that created the tangible features. There are several theories and criteria to select the elements of the Earth that are worthy to be considered as “geoheritage”, among the countless elements of the abiotic nature, which accounts for geodiversity. Most of these criteria are based on the recognition of the relevance that a given element has for humankind. However, these theories do not reach an agreement in the attribution of the geoheritage status to elements of geodiversity. Generally, national institutions bypass this problem focussing on the representation of the geosites, which are locations that feature some elements of geodiversity, which is of interest for the local communities and institutions. The result is that it may be difficult to compare data of sites and elements that are managed by different institutions. This thesis addresses information and knowledge about geoheritage features. Our aim is to propose a representation method of the data about geosites and elements of geoheritage that, on the one hand, enhances interoperability among the geosite data, on the other hand, offers a tool for decision makers (e.g., managers of national/geoparks) when there is the necessity of acting toward programs of protection of the most relevant features. Our method is based on the design of a semantics driven database to host the information about the elements that compose the geosites (elements of geodiversity). We provide a complete and coherent representation of the information about the geodiversity elements, grounded on ontology-based relations and controlled vocabularies, on which is furtherly built the representation of the geosites. We start from a review of the literature about geodiversity, geoheritage, geosite, focussing on the main concepts that are relevant for their description. In particular, we introduce a value-interest system to implement a characterization of geoheritage and geosite. Leaning on pre-existing ontologies, we design an ontology driven database for the representation of the geodiversity data, as well as an interface tool for the collection of data. The interface, tested by international testers (from Italy and Poland), will apply the approach to some groups of relevant case studies. Finally, discussion and conclusions will underline the novelties of this method with respect to the present situation and propose new perspectives of knowledge representation for geoheritage.