Enhancing Intangible Cultural Heritage through Ontology: the BISTÌRIS Model for Sardinian Traditional Costumes

The valorisation of territory and its cultural expressions is essential for preserving local identity and fostering a deeper understanding of intangible heritage. In this context, semantic tools such as ontologies offer a powerful means to structure, interlink, and enrich representations of cultural knowledge. In this paper, we present BISTÌRIS, an ontology designed to represent Sardinian traditional costumes—an emblematic and diverse form of intangible cultural heritage. Grounded in domain expert knowledge and developed following a structured methodological approach, BISTÌRIS provides a semantic framework tailored for the analytical description of garments. The ontology enables the comparison of costumes across different Sardinian communities and historical periods, highlighting local variations and the evolution of dressing practices. We describe the development process of the ontology and present the populated knowledge graph built on BISTÌRIS which supports semantic queries and facilitates advanced exploration of costume features. The ontology is evaluated through reasoning-based validation and practical query scenarios derived from real research questions. The resulting model supports both scholarly research in anthropology and cultural history, as well as digital applications in education, heritage preservation, and territorial promotion.