Etienne Posthumus, Prof. Dr. Harald Sack

ICONCLASS is the de facto global standard for the subject classification of cultural heritage
content. It has been translated into many languages, and is in use by many museums, libraries,
archives and research institutes to catalog their content. The main thesaurus has been available
in SKOS format since 2015. In an on-ongoing improvement, there are now also reference
images being added to the system, incorporating contributions from many sources.
In your thesis, we will model the content being added to the system as an ontology (the II
ontology), with links to other data sources like Wikidata. An analysis of the source data will be
done, mapping the contributed fields to the II ontology.
You will gain valuable hands-on experience in the practice of designing ontologies for real-world
usage in a complex domain, working with practitioners in the cultural heritage sector. This will
also improve the quality of how data is consumed in the Illustrated Iconclass.