1. Introduction

2. Methods

2.1. Archaeological Ontology

We found five types of archaeological ontology in the literature. We can cite the « Messaoudi ontology », « MONDIS » ontology, « PARCOURS » ontological model, the « CIDOC-CRM » ontology, and the « CARE » ontology.

• Messaoudi ontology

[16] introduced a domain ontology model dedicated to the semantic annotation of 3D representations of heritage objects aimed at creating a digital environment to describe the state of conservation of historic monuments. It took into consideration the three levels of study bringing together all the analyses carried out on the heritage: the visual appearance of its surface, its geometric shape, and the composition (physical and chemical) of its construction materials. The fusion of the three essential dimensions (semantic, spatial, and morphological) articulated with the identification of four thematic classes of observation (« Alteration », « Material », « Construction Technique » and « Architectural Components »), made it possible to take into consideration the quantitative aspects and the qualitative aspects inherent to the studies (visual, geometric and physicochemical) carried out by conservation experts. Through the interconnection of qualitative (linked to a formalization of domain knowledge) and quantitative descriptors, this ontology constitutes the conceptual scaffolding structuring a multidimensional information system dedicated to the spatial, geometric, and semantic correlation of sets of annotations developed by multiple actors and is based on multiple reading levels.

• b. « MONDIS » ontology

According to [10] MONDIS (MONument Damage Information System) is an information system structured by a domain ontology. It is based on an ontological representation of the field of heritage conservation, called Monument Damage Ontology. The latter makes it possible to reproduce in computer-readable form the basic dependence between the factors influencing the description, diagnosis, and intervention of damage to real estate objects. The creation of an ontology was initiated in order to exploit the capacity for automatic crossing reasoning: documentation on alterations of cultural heritage, the diagnosis of a particular monument, and intervention for possible restoration operations. The ontological model proposed by MONDIS is suitable for a wide range of populations. It makes it possible to cover a wide range of documentary and analytical studies for the evaluation of heritage as a whole and the matching of contents. It places more emphasis on qualitative aspects by considering architecture, alterations, diagnostics, and interventions, but makes little use of quantitative data despite the possibility of integrating information from these important analytical data sets.

• c. « PARCOURS » ontology

The PARCOURS ontological model (Cultural Heritage and Restoration-Conservation: Ontology for the Use of a Common Repository for Different Data Sources) makes it possible to uniformly query the different data sources available in databases [19]. Heterogeneous data can be of all types, such as entities coming from scientific imagery, analysis data, images, and many other instrumental measurements used to describe and monitor the state of conservation of heritage buildings. One of the main essential advantages of the PARCOURS model is that it makes it possible to connect heterogeneous data even though they come from distinct sources, each presenting different structures. The main objective of this ontology is to standardize and harmonize the quantity of data and various metadata in order to allow the expert user to carry out queries in order to obtain information concerning a particular entity. Also, it makes it possible to provide a common reference point that would facilitate the sharing of information between the different conservation-restoration stakeholders. The ontology was mainly constructed so that it represents the conservation-restoration processes undertaken on a cultural object considering a multidimensional aspect. This aspect has the particularity of relating the identification, location, and physical characteristics of the cultural heritage object with events that have an impact on the duration of its existence and therefore on its integrity.

• d. « CIDOC-CRM » ontology

The authors of [24] exploited the « CIDOC-CRM » ontology under the aegis of the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). This ontology is a conceptual reference model for information relating to cultural heritage that emanates from the world of museums. It has acquired the status of an ISO 2006 standard, but it remains in constant evolution and continues to be updated. It was essentially based on the description and modeling of notions, properties, and events that generate other events belonging to different classes. Indeed, the Introduction to the CIDOC Reference Conceptual Model (ISO 21127:2006), emanates from the world of museums and is used to structure and encode data on works, material or immaterial, of cultural heritage. This standard is mainly used as a reference for the semantic description of cultural heritage or museographic information, not so much in the scientific community. This ontology is characterized by a hierarchical organization of Classes, the definitions become more and more precise over the course of the “subclasses”. Class/Property associations (concepts/verbs) exist, knowing that a subclass inherits the properties of its parent classes. Several of these interactions and relationships are schematized in a series of diagrams available on the CIDOC website.

• e. « CARE » ontology

Also, we found an ontology for the international CARE project (Corpus Architecture Religiosae Europeae- IV-X sec) developed by [21]. The objective is to have an ontology of earlier Christian archaeological monuments relating to the European corpus of religious buildings from the 4th century to the 10th century. The knowledge of archaeologists is modeled through an application ontology that specializes in its field. The application is based on MediaWiki which has been extended to integrate domain semantics. For this purpose, Savonnet based itself on the « CIDOC (International Committee for Documentation) CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) » as a reference in the field essentially for the description of objects using the semantic wiki architecture of Wikibridge. The CARE ontology offers necessary knowledge related to the referencing of religious buildings on their evolution over the centuries through a spatiotemporal model specific to the discipline. The CARE ontology is oriented towards buildings from the origins until the 15th century, in all Christian countries.

Table 1. Comparison between some archaeological ontologies.

Table 1. Comparison between some archaeological ontologies.

	Advantages	Limits
Ontologie de Messaoudi [16]	Models 3D heritage objects aimed at creating a digital environment for the conservation of historic monuments.	Dedicated to heritage objects from France presented in 3D
Ontologie MONDIS [10]	Represents a model of heritage conservation	Dedicated to the documentation of the damage to built heritage, their diagnosis, and possible interventions
Modèle ontologique PARCOURS [19]	Represents the conservation-restoration processes undertaken on a cultural object	Specific to the cultural heritage of France
Ontologie « CIDOC-CRM » [24]	Represents a conceptual reference model Describes heritage events	Specific for the cultural heritage of museums
Ontologie « CARE » [21]	Describes and models the domain with the integration of religious heritage verification forms	Specific for churches

The five existing ontologies deal with very specific areas such as religious heritage, and the heritage of France where we cannot apply them to our areas of study. For this reason, we thought of creating our own ontology to do so we carried out a study on the methods for creating the ontology as you show in the table.

2.2. Taxonomies of Ontology Construction Methods

Generally speaking, the construction of the ontology begins with the identification of needs, modeling, the development of concepts, and the identification of the relationships concerned. We found nine ontology construction methods in the literature. Each method has its own construction steps which we identify in the following table. Consecutively, the demonstration of the ontology construction methods gives us the comparative table which signifies a distinction of the stages of each method. We used two symbols (+) means the method uses the designated step and the symbol (-) means it does not use it.

• Bachimont

This method is proposed in [4]. This method requires the developer to make semantic recognition after a description of the necessary terms of the ontology. This method is evaluated in three phases: linguistic specification of the ontology, knowledge modeling, and knowledge realization. This method accentuates the semantics of the modeled domain. Its concepts are represented differently depending on their contexts.

• b. Enterprise Ontology

This method is based on the qualification of the construction of the ontology “Enterprise Ontology” which is based on the extraction of different phases which are as follows, [25]: the determination of the WHY of the ontology, the creation of the ontology (identification of the main concepts, informal organization, structuring) and the verification and description of the ontology.

• c. Kactus

The Kactus method is presented by [12] whose aim is to carry out a study of the creation of ontology. So, the principle consists of dividing the ontology into components so that it generates a new ontology.

• d. Methondology

« Methodology » is a method for creating ontology, it is found in the project management process, from the identification of needs to the realization and maintenance stage, [22]. The Methodology approach has six phases which are: specification, conceptualization, formalization, integration, implementation, and maintenance. This method insists on using knowledge during the ontology conceptualization stage. Then, it is necessary to create a term thesaurus divided into concepts and verbs. Concepts are represented in the form of classification trees to group the necessary information such as (names and synonyms, instances, class attributes, and their instances and relationships linked to the concepts). Then, the verbs consist of creating relationship diagrams which involve creating tables such as instance attribute table, binary relationship table, instance attribute table, class table, constante table, and rules table.

• e. On To-Knowledge (OTK)

On To-Knowledge (OTK) [5] is a method that represents the life of ontology and it is divided into five phases: analysis of the accessibility of the ontology, modeling of the ontology, assignment, verification, and maintenance.

• f. Sensus

The SENSUS method consists of improving an ontology that has already been created, [1]. This method contains five phases which are as follows: extract the necessary terms from the existing ontology, link the terms to the concepts with which instances are found, identify the modeling part that correlates the concepts which are extracted previously, insert specific terms from the domain of ontology and integrate the entire subtree. During this step, the creator of the ontology must take into consideration the nodes which have many paths and which pass through the newly generated tree.

• g. Stanford

The Stanford method is deployed by Stanford University with the use of protected software which is based on six phases: [12]: identify the domain, exploit the ontologies already created, identify the essential terms of the ontology, determine the properties of the classes and their attributes, determine the facets of the attributes and create the instances of the classes in the hierarchy. The construction of this method is based on these different stages which answer the following questions: what is the domain to be modeled by the ontology? the objective of constructing the ontology? who will exploit and verify the ontology?

• h. TOVE

TOVE is a method [14] based on the ontology development process of the TOVE (TOrento Virtual Enterprise) project. It completes the stage of creating a logical knowledge model. The TOVE method is based on the following steps: the determination of the problems (scenarios) necessary for the application, the affirmation of the informal questions (based on the scenarios) to which the ontology allows to answer, the assignment of terminology of the terms that are asked in the questions, the formal specification of the axioms and description of the terminology terms and the verification of satisfaction of the ontology. The TOVE method always remains distracted. The different phases and approaches cannot describe the domain of ontology in detail.

i.

Uschold et King

The Uschold and King method has four phases, [26]: determining the goals and domain of the ontology, determining the components of the ontology: Concepts, relationships and determining the necessary terms of concepts, the explicit representation of the conceptualization of the ontology and the verification and documentation of the ontology. It is a method that represents the basis of ontology construction in a general way.

In the above, we have emerged from previous work that the existing ontologies are more or less complete to represent the knowledge of the Tunisian archaeological image. The field of Tunisian archeology is very diverse. The development of a classic ontology can cope with this heterogeneity. In addition, these ontologies guarantee several interesting objectives such as interoperability between systems and communication between different agents. And, Tunisian archaeological monuments do not have the same characteristics as churches, for example.

Table 2. Comparison between different ontology construction methods.

Table 2. Comparison between different ontology construction methods.

Steps Methods	Spécification: analysis of the accessibility of the ontology	Modeling: Conceptualization	Verification and description	Assignment	Maintenance	Integration: Exploiting other ontologies	Implementation « Operational modeling »	Formalization: Convert the conceptual model into a formal model
Bachimont [4]	+	+	+	+	+	-	-	-
Enterprise Ontology [25]	+	+	+	-	-	-	-	-
Kactus [12]	+	+	-	-	-	-	-	-
Methontology [22]	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+
On To-Knowledge (OTK) [5]	+	+	+	+	+	-	-	-
Sensus [1]	+	+	+	+	-	-	-	-
Stanford [12]	+	+	+	+	+	+	-	-
TOVE [14]	+	+	+	+	-	-	-	-
Uschold et King [26]	+	+	+	+	+	-	-	-

On the other hand, and as we mentioned, we did not find, in the literature, any work dealing with the construction of Tunisian archaeological ontology. Given the need to integrate an ontology into our annotation model, we see it useful to create our own ontology. The latter makes it possible to represent knowledge about Tunisian archaeological monuments. Based on this comparison between the different methods and the steps they each involve, we chose the Stanford method to create our OnTunAr ontology we followed its steps.

3. Resultat : OnTunAr of our « AAIAT » model

Figure 1. Example of an extract from the OnTunAr ontology and its translation into OWL.

Figure 1. Example of an extract from the OnTunAr ontology and its translation into OWL.

Figure 2. Extract OnTunAr.

Figure 2. Extract OnTunAr.

Table 3. Specification OnTunAr.

• b. Step 2: Validation of classes

•

The class « Anthroponomys » contains three subclasses which are:

-

« Divinity »: presents the description of the deities;

-

« Hero »: describes the list of heroes;

-

« Religieus-figures »: Contains the list of religious figures.

•

The « Peoples » class is made up of two subclasses which are:

-

« Name_People »: includes the names of historical entities;

-

« Civilization » (Civilization): represents the civilization that corresponds to the monument.

-

The « Site » class is made up of two subclasses which are:

-

« Name »: includes the names of Tunisian archaeological sites. We cite as an example the names of sites: Dougga, Sbeïtla, Carthage, El Djem and others;

-

« Number_of_site »: Contains the number of Tunisian archaeological sites.

Table 4. Glossary of « DOUGGA » site.

Figure 3. The hierarchy of classes « OnTunAr ».

Figure 3. The hierarchy of classes « OnTunAr ».

Table 5. Glossary of the concept of « Monuments ».

Figure 4. Site of « DOUGGA ».

Figure 4. Site of « DOUGGA ».

Table 6. Class attributes.

Table 7. Attributes of « OnTunAr ».

• b. Step 3: Extracting relationships

Table 8. Relationships from « OnTunAr ».

• c. Step 4: Disambiguation of relationships

Table 9. The axioms.

• d. Step 5: The integrity of OnTunAr with the « AAIAT » model

Figure 5. OnTunAr illustration.

Figure 5. OnTunAr illustration.

4. Discussion

Figure 6. Performance AAIAT.

Figure 6. Performance AAIAT.

Table 10. Result of the annotation with and without ontology.

5. Conclusion

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