Rights to Richness: Connecting Cultural Artefacts with Rights and Context

The Cultural Heritage domain is actively engaged in digitising collections and building a central digital infrastructure, a critical effort supported by European initiatives to preserve artefacts and facilitate their reuse. Integrating diverse cultural heritage data into a central infrastructure is challenging due to the heterogeneity of the data and the limitations of existing data models in preserving contextual information. Furthermore, the lack of machine-understandable rights statements for digital artefacts hinders their reuse. This work addresses these issues by developing a framework that incorporates machine-understandable rights statements and enhances preservation of context during data integration. This paper introduces two key contributions: CACAO, an ontology extending CIDOC-CRM for rights and context with accompanying rights vocabulary and ARTKB, a knowledge graph utilising CACAO. The CACAO ontology was developed in collaboration with four CH institutes, validating its applicability and understandability across diverse data types. The ontology extends CIDOC-CRM by integrating ODRL for structured rights expression and by introducing new, more specific concepts for detailed contextual information. The CACAO ontology serves as a common data model, improving interoperability among CH institutions, enhancing the preservation of original context, and allowing for the definition of flexible usage policies for digital artefacts. This work represents significant progress in Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) management and contextual modelling for cultural heritage.