SWODCH 2026 is the sixth edition of the International Workshop on Semantic Web and Ontology Design for Cultural Heritage which took place on the 26th October in Bari, Italy, as part of the 25th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2026).
SWODCH is a series of annual conferences whose purpose is to gather original research on the design of conceptual models, ontologies, and Semantic Web (SW) technologies for Cultural Heritage (CH). The heterogeneous and multi-format data available in these domains call for principled methodologies and technologies to semantically characterise, integrate, and reason over data, as well as to support its retrieval, management, analysis, and visualisation. The workshop also welcomes studies addressing the philosophical and social analysis of CH data and knowledge representation models, as ontologies in this domain need to account for the historical and social dimensions of data. SWODCH aims to bring together stakeholders – scholars from Computer Science and the Humanities and GLAM professionals, representatives from CH institutions, etc. – who are involved in the development and deployment of concrete solutions for Cultural Heritage.
This year, the invited talk was dedicated to ECHOES, with a focus on the CHPortal newly created within its knowledge pillar. The CHPortal (https://chportal.culturalheritagecloud.eu/) is a catalogue of CH vocabularies, thesauri and ontologies, which comes with many services to use and improve those semantic artefacts: search, mappings, recommender, annotator, FAIR evaluator, etc. About 30 creators and users of CH semantic artefacts attended to its presentation and many of them declared they will use it.
CHPortal has been created through the OntoPortal Alliance, a consortium of several research and infrastructure teams and a company dedicated to promoting the development of ontology repositories.
