The National Monument Institute is a Czech governmental agency whose remit covers the care of all heritage monuments and artefacts owned by the State. This involves of their identification, registration, monitoring, maintenance and restoration. In addition, the institute acts as an advisory body for monuments and artefacts in private ownership and also monitors the legal status of heritage objects in the country.

A number of regional historians associated with the National Monument Institute form the Historical Monument Protection community. During the trial the community created a typology of rural sacral architecture with concrete examples exhibiting typical features. The results are being prepared for use by the public as a guide to rural and sacral architecture along the Czech/Austrian border.

During the trial, a map of the concepts related to chapels was created. This was used to describe selected chapels in terms of their architectural features. The resulting descriptions can now be used to explore the archive of rural and sacral architecture.

The conceptual map of the rural and sacral architecture domain was developed by members of the community using Apollo. Apollo is a graphical ontology editor that allows people to define concepts and relations between them.

The Resource Annotation and Outline creation (RAT-O) tool, developed by CTU, was used to search for architectural concepts and examples. It also supported the planning, structuring and authoring of an online guide to rural and sacral architecture along the Czech/Autrian border.

• An ontology describing the typology of chapels was produced by the community. The structure of the developed ontology is applicable across the whole area of rural and sacral architecture.
• The RAT-O tool has been found to effectively support the planning, structuring and authoring of web documents using online resources.

Contact: Zdenek Kouba (kouba@labe.felk.cvut.cz)