This work regards the digital representation of tangible and intangible dimensions of heritage crafts, towards craft preservation. Based on state-of-the-art digital documentation, knowledge representation and narrative creation approach are presented. Craft presentation methods that use the represented content to provide accurate, intuitive, engaging, and educational ways for HC presentation and appreciation are proposed. The proposed methods aim to contribute to HC preservation, by adding value to the cultural visit, before, and after it.

In this article, the Mingei Online Platform is presented as an authoring platform for the representation of social and historic context encompassing a focal topic of interest. The proposed representation is employed in the contextualised presentation of a given topic, through documented narratives that support its presentation to diverse audiences. Using the obtained representation, the documentation and digital preservation of social and historical dimensions of Cultural Heritage are demonstrated. The implementation follows the Human-Centred Design approach and has been conducted under an iterative design and evaluation approach involving both usability and domain experts.

Digital Libraries (DLs), especially in the Cultural Heritage domain, are rich in narratives. Every digital object in a DL tells some kind of story, regardless of the medium, the genre, or the type of the object. However, DLs do not offer services about narratives, for example it is not possible to discover a narrative, to create one, or to compare two narratives. Certainly, DLs offer discovery functionalities over their contents, but these services merely address the objects that carry the narratives (e.g. books, images, audiovisual objects), without regard for the narratives themselves. The present work aims at introducing narratives as first-class citizens in DLs, by providing a formal expression of what a narrative is. In particular, this paper presents a conceptualisation of the domain of narratives, and its specification through the Narrative Ontology (NOnt for short), expressed in first-order logic. NOnt has been implemented as an extension of three standard vocabularies, i.e. the CIDOC CRM, FRBRoo, and OWL Time, and using the SWRL rule language to express the axioms. On the basis of NOnt, we have developed the Narrative Building and Visualising (NBVT) tool, and applied it in four case studies to validate the ontology. NOnt is also being validated in the context of the Mingei European project, in which it is applied to the representation of knowledge about Craft Heritage.