Culture Knowledge Graph
The Culture Knowledge Graph (CKG) is the integrating linked open data graph of NFDI4Culture, the German National Research Data Infrastructure consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage. It acts as a single point of access, or data index, over decentralized research data collections, repositories, portals, software tools, infrastructures, and services across the NFDI4Culture subject areas of architecture, art history, media studies, musicology, and the performing arts. Beyond describing the consortium and its infrastructure, the graph indexes the content of contributed research data, including cultural heritage objects, persons, locations, and events, along with references to the external vocabularies used to identify and classify them, and access and reuse information such as legal statements, contact persons, and export formats. Contributing institutions supply metadata in the Culture Graph Interchange Format (CGIF), which is harvested through a dedicated ETL pipeline and integrated into the graph. The NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO), a domain module of the NFDIcore mid-level ontology aligned with Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) 2020, provides the semantic backbone. The graph is reported to hold roughly 106 million RDF triples and is queryable through a public SPARQL endpoint.
[{"category": "Organization", "contact_details": [{"contact_type": "url", "value": "https://nfdi4culture.de/helpdesk.html"}, {"contact_type": "url", "value": "https://nfdi4culture.de/"}], "label": "NFDI4Culture"}]
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{"activity_status": "active", "category": "KnowledgeGraph", "contacts": [{"category": "Organization", "contact_details": [{"contact_type": "url", "value": "https://nfdi4culture.de/helpdesk.html"}, {"contact_type": "url", "value": "https://nfdi4culture.de/"}], "label": "NFDI4Culture"}], "creation_date": "2026-08-06T00:00:00Z", "description": "The Culture Knowledge Graph (CKG) is the integrating linked open data graph of NFDI4Culture, the German National Research Data Infrastructure consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage. It acts as a single point of access, or data index, over decentralized research data collections, repositories, portals, software tools, infrastructures, and services across the NFDI4Culture subject areas of architecture, art history, media studies, musicology, and the performing arts. Beyond describing the consortium and its infrastructure, the graph indexes the content of contributed research data, including cultural heritage objects, persons, locations, and events, along with references to the external vocabularies used to identify and classify them, and access and reuse information such as legal statements, contact persons, and export formats. Contributing institutions supply metadata in the Culture Graph Interchange Format (CGIF), which is harvested through a dedicated ETL pipeline and integrated into the graph. The NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO), a domain module of the NFDIcore mid-level ontology aligned with Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) 2020, provides the semantic backbone. The graph is reported to hold roughly 106 million RDF triples and is queryable through a public SPARQL endpoint.", "domains": ["humanities and cultural heritage"], "homepage_url": "https://nfdi4culture.de/services/details/culture-knowledge-graph.html", "id": "culture-knowledge-graph", "last_modified_date": "2026-08-06T00:00:00Z", "layout": "resource_detail", "name": "Culture Knowledge Graph", "products": [{"category": "ProgrammingInterface", "description": "Public SPARQL 1.1 endpoint over the Culture Knowledge Graph, with a browsable query interface and documented example queries covering research data repositories and portals, NFDI4Culture partner organizations with their Wikidata mappings, triple counts, and listings of types and properties in the graph.", "format": "http", "id": "culture-knowledge-graph.sparql", "is_public": true, "name": "Culture Knowledge Graph SPARQL Endpoint", "original_source": [{"relation_type": "prov:hadPrimarySource", "source": "culture-knowledge-graph"}], "product_url": "https://nfdi4culture.de/resources/knowledge-graph.html"}, {"category": "GraphicalInterface", "description": "Culture Data Search, the faceted discovery interface over the Culture Knowledge Graph, served by the shmarql SPARQL exploration tool developed within NFDI4Culture.", "format": "http", "id": "culture-knowledge-graph.data-search", "name": "Culture Data Search", "original_source": [{"relation_type": "prov:hadPrimarySource", "source": "culture-knowledge-graph"}], "product_url": "https://nfdi4culture.de/shmarql/"}, {"category": "GraphProduct", "description": "Full RDF dump of the Culture Knowledge Graph in N-Triples, referenced from the SPARQL endpoint page alongside the public query interface. NFDI4Culture describes the integrated resources as version controlled and regularly updated through a Git repository from which the data dump is offered.", "format": "ntriples", "id": "culture-knowledge-graph.dump", "name": "Culture Knowledge Graph RDF Dump", "original_source": [{"relation_type": "prov:hadPrimarySource", "source": "culture-knowledge-graph"}], "product_url": "https://nfdi4culture.de/resources/knowledge-graph.html", "warnings": ["A stable direct download URL for the dump was not located when this entry was created on 2026-08-06; the dump is reached through the SPARQL endpoint page."]}, {"category": "OntologyProduct", "description": "The NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO), the domain-specific module used to structure the Culture Knowledge Graph. CTO builds on the NFDIcore mid-level ontology v3 and is aligned with Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) 2020. It is developed in Task Area 5 of NFDI4Culture and published in OWL and Turtle, with base and full variants.", "format": "ttl", "id": "culture-knowledge-graph.cto", "name": "NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO)", "original_source": [{"relation_type": "prov:hadPrimarySource", "source": "culture-knowledge-graph"}], "product_url": "https://nfdi4culture.de/ontology/", "repository": "https://github.com/ISE-FIZKarlsruhe/nfdi4culture"}, {"category": "DataModelProduct", "description": "The Culture Graph Interchange Format (CGIF), the specification and workflow that data providers follow to contribute research data metadata for harvesting into the Culture Knowledge Graph.", "format": "ttl", "id": "culture-knowledge-graph.cgif", "name": "Culture Graph Interchange Format (CGIF)", "original_source": [{"relation_type": "prov:hadPrimarySource", "source": "culture-knowledge-graph"}], "product_url": "https://docs.nfdi4culture.de/ta5-cgif-specification/introduction"}, {"category": "DocumentationProduct", "description": "NFDI4Culture service page for the Culture Knowledge Graph, describing its scope, the technologies and ontologies used, the data integration workflow, and the team responsible for it.", "format": "http", "id": "culture-knowledge-graph.documentation", "name": "Culture Knowledge Graph Service Page", "original_source": [{"relation_type": "prov:hadPrimarySource", "source": "culture-knowledge-graph"}], "product_url": "https://nfdi4culture.de/services/details/culture-knowledge-graph.html"}, {"category": "DocumentationProduct", "description": "Documentation for the NFDI4Culture Ontology (CTO), generated from the ontology source and published by FIZ Karlsruhe.", "format": "http", "id": "culture-knowledge-graph.cto-documentation", "name": "NFDI4Culture Ontology Documentation", "original_source": [{"relation_type": "prov:hadPrimarySource", "source": "culture-knowledge-graph"}, {"relation_type": "prov:hadPrimarySource", "source": "culture-knowledge-graph.cto"}], "product_url": "https://nfdi.fiz-karlsruhe.de/4culture/"}], "repository": "https://github.com/ISE-FIZKarlsruhe/nfdi4culture", "synonyms": ["CKG", "NFDI4Culture Knowledge Graph"], "warnings": ["No license statement for the graph data was located when this entry was created on 2026-08-06. NFDI4Culture describes the graph as linked open data, but the specific license for the dump and endpoint should be confirmed with the NFDI4Culture helpdesk."]}