Dead on arrival? URI failure patterns and ontology monitoring in the Heritage domain

Erica Scarpa

«Archeologia e Calcolatori» 2026, 37.1, 407-414; doi: 10.19282/ac.37.1.2026.22

Abstract

The proliferation of ontologies in the Heritage and digital humanities domain has accelerated significantly over the past two decades, driven by the growth of semantic web technologies, increasing demands for data interoperability, and the prevalence of project-based research funding, which tends to support the creation of new semantic models but provides little provision for their long-term maintenance and community uptake. The gap between ontology publication and ontology implementation has remained largely unexamined: many semantic models are proposed, described in academic papers, and then quietly abandoned, never reaching a machine-readable encoding, a stable namespace, or an active user community. No systematic evidence of the scale or pattern of this abandonment exists. This paper presents a preliminary assessment this phenomenon, drawing on the Heritage - Semantic Tools and Interoperability Survey (H-SeTIS), a curated registry of ontologies, metadata standards, and semantic tools developed for the cultural heritage domain. Based on a prototyped monitoring tool, it aims at quantifying the scale of ontology abandonment and identify the characteristic lifecycle patterns through which models fail or stall reaching operational use.

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