An Ontological Approach for Creating a Brassware Craft Knowledge Base

Abstract

Terengganu brassware is a local craft product with high artistic value and traditional craftsmanship that involves a lot of creativity and elaborate artistry. This cultural heritage is in danger of disappearing because the current younger generation lacks interest, creativity and artistic skills to continue the craftsmanship. Therefore, gathering detailed knowledge of the craft from ageing practitioners can preserve the heritage. This article reports the study on brassware intangible heritage knowledge base development using an ontological approach. The ontology modelling used Ontology Development 101. Content validation result by experts found that the brassware ontology is complete, consistent, concise, precise and clear. Evaluation results show that the experts agreed on content representation (mean ≥3.80), and the ontology meets all the quality criteria (mean ≥4.03). The brassware craft ontology contributes to the intangible heritage preservation effort for one of the almost extinct local culture and practices. This intangible heritage knowledge base can be applied for the development of semantic search, mobile and gaming applications to attract and disseminate heritage information to young people. Additionally, the ontological design can serve as a guide for the design and development of a knowledge base for other types of heritage.

Keywords

• Intangible cultural heritage
• knowledge base
• knowledge representation
• ontology evaluation