  The present paper concerns the design of the semantic infrastructure of the
digital space for cultural heritage as envisaged by the European Commission in
its recent documents. Due to the complexity of the cultural heritage data and
of their intrinsic interrelationships, it is necessary to introduce a novel
ontology, yet compliant with existing standards and interoperable with previous
platforms used in this context, such as Europeana. The digital space
organization must be tailored to the methods and the theory of cultural
heritage, briefly summarized in the introduction. The new ontology is based on
the Digital Twin concept, i.e. the digital counterpart of cultural heritage
assets incorporating all the digital information pertaining to them. This
creates a Knowledge Base on the cultural heritage digital space. The paper
outlines the main features of the proposed Heritage Digital Twin ontology and
provides some examples of application. Future work will include completing the
ontology in all its details and testing it in other real cases and with the
various sectors of the cultural heritage community.
