Cultural heritage and multidimensional representations of buildings: a semiotic approach to GI-ontologies

Cultural heritage means something to most of us and historical buildings play a role in many peoples daily life. As part of historical or architectural research those buildings represent in themselves former ways of living that has to be documented, analysed and communicated. Furthermore those buildings can be represented in various ways due to a variety of purposes in society. Dealing with city management in general the complex of information concerning historical buildings is for instance present when handling building permissions or city renewal processes, facilitating tourism as well as branding the city or cultural environments in a broader sense. In the geo-information community as well as in the built environment metadata and meta-information as means of communicating content and usability of datasets and information setups has been a key matter for several years. The approach in this paper is the belief that a more abstract level for reflection and understanding of the various modelling processes is needed. Addressing this matter a semiotic modelling tool will be introduced as a formal ontological schema capable of framing the various representational levels concerning complex multidimensional geo-phenomena present in a city management GI-infrastructure. The semiotics of Peirce is of increasing interest as means of understanding the fabric and dynamics of representation as well as the processes of communication in general. So it is argued, that the semiotic principle of constantly considering the relations between the three basic elements – the representation, the object of the representation and the way the object is represented – establishes an abstract cognitive framework for handling the analysis of the various communicative aspects related to the complex questions of data quality and metadata, meta-information or even meta-understandings.