By
Chris Reed (contents author)
Summary
The management of Cultural Heritage is a relevant item in the agenda both of public administrations and civil society. One of the critical points in this task is to find the perfect balance between maintenance and enjoyment, between keeping them for the future and open them to visitors. In some specific monuments, which are very popular, this middle point is extremely difficult to find because they are very fragile. In order to make a decision, public administrations use to consult different experts, and as a result, controversies between experts them rise.In this work, we analyse a real example, the contradictions between different researchers in Cultural Heritage about the Cave of Altamira (Cantabria, Spain), one of the most relevant remains of prehistoric painting in Europe. This is a good example of controversy, because of it satisfies Crawshay?s definition (i.e., ?disagreement between the defender of a statement and an attacker of this statement concerning the criteria according to which the statement is to be tested?) and it has some of the main features proposed by Dascal?s: the positions are dichotomize (both are incompatible); both are experts and they argue about the reliability of their respective methodology and results and, finally, a third part, the Cave of Altamira?s management office, has to resolve the dichotomy.In order to understand the insight of this problem, we analyse this controversy both from its dialogical structure, by means of the Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT), and the ontological commitments of the experts, by means of Cultural Heritage Abstract Reference Model (CHARM) from different resources, such us the articles published in the Spanish journal ?El País?. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposal to link a formal domain ontology with the argumentative structure in a controversy in order to identify their inner structure.
Keywords
Cultural heritage. Argumentation. Controversy.