Routes of the Tagus Floodplain
Lezíria do Tejo is a field notebook for a personal project on the Heritage and History of the Ribatejo region and the “Lezíria do Tejo”, the Tagus floodplain , in Portugal.
This work is seen eventually as part of a future Cultural Route of the European Floodplains (see the page of the Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe program).
In its own words: “Launched by the Council of Europe in 1987, the Cultural Routes demonstrate, by means of a journey through space and time, how the heritage of the different countries and cultures of Europe contributes to a shared and living cultural heritage.”
For a general view of the European floodplains see the Floodplain statistics viewer of the European Environment Information and Observation Network (Eionet).
Most of this work will be done as a retirement and family project, involving the collaboration of my wife, Diana Carvalho, to whom I owe the growing awareness of the Ribatejo region, were we spent most of the time during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Tagus river and its plains were a warm and welcoming refuge and sanctuary during this period.
The project aims the publication of a printed guide (probably in Portuguese) and a semantic wiki.
For the wiki, we are crafting a special ontology, LocH – Local Heritage and History. LocH is based on the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), and uses the definitions from other ontologies, like ArCo – Architettura della Conoscenza and Cultural-ON, both produced by the Italian Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali.
Because of the nature of a wiki, were each class corresponds to one category of various pages (instances), we introduced a number of changes to the CIDOC CRM approach, reducing the number of classes and introducing a number of data properties.
The ontology is still not stable. Fig. 1 shows the classes (with labels in Portuguese) of the current version (click to enlarge).
Fig. 2 shows an example with the relations (object properties) between of a number of instances (click to enlarge).
