HeritageGraph is an RDF knowledge graph of Nepal’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage, built on the CIDOC-CRM-aligned HeritageGraph ontology and populated from trusted open sources. It includes heritage sites, monuments, temples, stupas, monasteries, traditional stone water spouts, festivals, masked dances, Guthi institutions, deities, ritual roles, and syncretic relationships. Each entity includes machine-readable provenance, and where available, links to Wikidata and OpenStreetMap. The data is published as RDF Turtle in source-specific named graphs, validated against SHACL shapes, and contains no synthetic data.
Every entity carries machine-readable provenance and a link back to its source.
heritagegraph/
├── README.md ← this file
├── LICENSE.txt ← per-source licensing (CC0 / ODbL / CC BY)
├── ontology/ ← schema (TBox)
│ ├── HeritageGraph.ttl OWL ontology (namespace https://cair-nepal.org/heritagegraph/)
│ ├── HeritageGraph.shacl.ttl SHACL shapes (validation)
│ └── HeritageGraph.yaml LinkML source
├── kg/ ← data (ABox), one file per source / named graph
│ ├── wikidata.ttl CC0 ~254 richly-described entities
│ ├── osm.ttl ODbL ~7,589 geolocated physical features
│ ├── unesco.ttl — 8 World Heritage cultural components
│ ├── intangible.ttl CC BY festivals, Guthi, Kumari, deities, castes, rituals
│ ├── crosswalk.ttl mixed owl:sameAs / provenance back-links (not SHACL-validated)
│ └── intangible_crosswalk.ttl mixed intangible-layer owl:sameAs / typing links
└── examples/
├── competency-questions.md 32 SPARQL competency questions
├── competency-questions-data-results.txt sample results over this data
└── build_stats.json entity counts per source / class
~7,850 tangible heritage entities (temples, stupas, monasteries, traditional water spouts/dhunge dhara, monuments) + a curated intangible-heritage layer.
| Class | Count |
|---|---|
| ArchitecturalStructure | 6,771 |
| BuddhistMonument | 798 |
| WaterStructure | 141 |
| DhungeDhara | 115 |
| Chaitya / Stupa | 13 / 13 |
| Murti | 1 |
| + intangible: festivals, chariot festivals, masked dances, Guthi, caste groups, deities, rituals, Living-Goddess lifecycle |
Data is RDF 1.1 Turtle (.ttl). Query it with rdflib
(Python) or load into a triplestore — Amazon Neptune,
Apache Jena Fuseki, or GraphDB —
and query with SPARQL. Validate extensions against ontology/HeritageGraph.shacl.ttl.
The sources are kept in separate named graphs so a pure-CC0 core
(Wikidata + UNESCO) can be used independently of the share-alike OSM (ODbL)
layer. See LICENSE.txt.
- Schema / classes & properties:
https://cair-nepal.org/heritagegraph/ - Instance identifiers:
https://data.cair-nepal.org/heritagegraph/
from rdflib import Graph
g = Graph()
for f in ["wikidata", "osm", "unesco", "intangible", "crosswalk", "intangible_crosswalk"]:
g.parse(f"kg/{f}.ttl", format="turtle")
print(len(g), "triples")See the Get to Know the HeritageGraph KG tutorial on GitHub, or the Registry of Open Data on AWS entry once published.