The activities of COSCH community and the disciplines it represents were as diverse as they could possibly be in research into cultural heritage. To achieve common goals it was of utmost importance to have a common understanding of these diverse activities and disciplines. Work on the COSCH Knowledge Representation, or COSCHKR, was undertaken to develop a common semantic base representing different disciplines and to facilitate communication within the Action. The COSCHKR is an ontology-based inference model, guided by inference rules that provide a semantic bridge between various interdisciplinary activities involved in non-invasive technical documentation of material cultural heritage. The model is intended to support humanities experts by recommending optimal spatial and spectral techniques. The model may also be used by technology experts to compare their own solutions with the ones recommended through COSCHKR, and to understand why they may differ.
In this chapter we present the methods adopted for designing the COSCHKR and the steps in the development of the inference model. The difficulties in maintaining a common level of understanding within the diverse disciplines during the knowledge acquisition process are discussed. We present mechanisms and methods of information collection, its structuring, and aligning, to formulate different axioms and theorems within the model. The design and development of COSCHKR was based on an iterative procedure where the gathered knowledge was first verified with the group of experts before it was processed. This verification mechanism was important for the reliability of the model, ensuring technical consistency. This chapter highlights the importance of these iterative mechanisms in the validation of knowledge gathered and then information populated inside the knowledge base.

Accuracy, Artefact, Feature, Precision, Reconstruction, Resolution, Texture, Uncertainty are words central to many discussions of the documentation of CH. This chapter charts the interdisciplinary discussion towards a common understanding of terminologies used in CH. It is a discussion that recognizes critical differences or common misuse, and aims to contribute to a shared understanding that may be useful for all knowledge domains in the field.

It is common for cultural heritage applications to use spatial and/or spectral data for documentation, analysis and visualisation. Knowledge on data requirements coming from the cultural heritage application and technical alternatives to generate the required data based on object characteristics and other influencings factors paves the way for the optimal selection of a recording technology. It is a collaborative process requiring knowledge of experts from cultural heritage domains and technical domains. Currently, this knowledge is structured and stored in an ontology (so-called COSCHKR). It has the purpose to support CH experts not familiar with technologies through prescribing an optimal spatial or spectral recording strategy adapted to the physical characteristics of the cultural heritage object and the data requirements of the targeted CH application. The creation of digital 3D reconstructed models for analysis and visualisation purposes is getting more and more common within humanities disciplines. Therefore, an implementation of mechanisms involved in visualisation applications into this ontology would have huge benefits in creating a powerful recommendation solution. A structured view on such project workflows facilitates a rough match with the existing knowledge representation. Illustrating the overall structure of COSCHKR, this paper addresses and discusses challenges in structuring the processes of cultural heritage visualisation and implementing these into the ontology.