Abstract

The Digital Heraldry Ontology enables the encoding of coats of arms, based on the practices of blazoning. This is done by regarding coats of arms as conceptual objects (rather than images or textual representations), composed in a specific way of figures, tinctures, and geometric patterns. In this way, any combination of coats of arms can be created in a machine-readable way. Thereby, the ontology can be used as a controlled vocabulary to annotate and semantically describe coats of arms e.g. on different material objects, which then can be uniquely referenced as Linked Data.