Creating Authentic Stories in a Cultural Heritage Knowledge Architecture:Modeling 3D reconstructions, replicas and restorations of the Chest of Distress of Maastricht

Description

A central term in cultural heritage studies that is used to safeguard the original identity of the object during a restoration is “authenticity”. It is a much discussed, even contested term, which has resulted in a wide typology. Some examples of such types are objective authenticity (focusing on materials aspects), constructive authenticity (focusing on functions of objects in their cultural and historical contexts), existential authenticity (based on personal experiences and subjective meanings/values), and postmodern authenticity (authenticity as social constructs).

Laurajane Smith, in her seminal work “Uses of Heritage,” defines cultural heritage as “a process of remembering and memory making – of mediating cultural and social change, of negotiating and creating and recreating values.” (Smith 2006, 56 and 307). One of the processes in which the authenticity of cultural heritage objects and their social and cultural uses are renegotiated is during restorations. In these processes, restoration committee members, restorers, and sometimes the general public balance between old stories associated with the identity of cultural heritage objects or try to underpin the authenticity with new ones as argumentation for (proposed) changes.
Assigning meaning to cultural objects and intangible expressions is often related to stories around a specific site or locus, while the locally produced values of these manifestations should be acknowledged universally (Blake 2002). One of the strategies advocated by international and national cultural heritage policies is knowledge production (UNESCO 1972 and 2003, Council of Europe 1998, Erfgoedwet 2026). We argue that semantic web technologies can play a role in these strategies. The creation of a global knowledge architecture allows for recognizing patterns and similarities that support debates around the question of how cultural heritage worldwide can be safeguarded in an optimal way. Decision-making in restoration practices and the validation of the outcomes hereof can benefit from a digital knowledge architecture based on ontologies that can capture changes in stories of objects in their social and cultural contexts. In order to investigate and assess the impact of changes due to restorations on the original identity of these artefacts and immaterial expressions related to them, we propose modeling various concepts of authenticity.
To this end, we explore the potential of integrating 3D reconstructions of the history and restorations of the 12th century reliquary shrine of Saint Servatius, the so-called Chest of Distress in Maastricht, and its contexts in a semantic web knowledge graph.

Period	03 Jun 2026
Event title	DH Benelux 2026: Digital Storytelling
Event type	Conference
Conference number	13
Location	Maastricht, NetherlandsShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International