The Historical Framing Problem: Temporal Modeling of Interactions between Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage

The distinction between tangible and intangible cultural heritage is problematic for the modeling of interactions between material and immaterial expressions of the arts. This hinders capturing changes in artworks in their cultural contexts necessary to understand their social functions and symbolic meanings. This paper addresses this problem twofold. First, after providing a theoretical-historiographical overview of the concepts framing and historical time, it proposes a historical frames system with three components: reference frames, annotation frames and historical frames. A model of historical frames allowing for spatial-temporal views of storylines is discussed in more detail. Second, a preliminary ontological model is provided that expresses the historical frames by extending existing ontologies. As most interactions between tangible and intangible cultural heritage are less defined, particular attention is paid to the modeling of ephemeral events. The model is designed using five types of such interactions in a case study of the late 12th century reliquary shrine of St Servatius in Maastricht and festivities around it. The outcomes are four modules describing 1) functions of objects in context 2) frames capturing different temporal, in particular ephemeral events and 3) the evolution of material and immaterial objects and 4) peculiarities of ephemeral events and objects.