The lineage begins in 1989–2001 with Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web: a “web of linked data” in which information is not merely displayed but given explicit, machine-readable meaning through RDF (Resource Description Framework), OWL (Web Ontology Language), and URIs. The goal was to move beyond the document-centric web toward a web of statements—triples of subject-predicate-object—that could be queried, reasoned over, and integrated across domains. This foundational layer enabled the explosion of Linked Open Data (LOD) and gave rise to the first generation of cultural heritage ontologies. CIDOC CRM (ISO 21127), developed in the 1990s–2000s for museums and archives, became the canonical event-centric model: it treats cultural objects and sites not as static records but as nodes in networks of events, actors, and relations. Europeana’s Data Model (EDM) and the Linked Art profile later operationalised these ideas at continental scale, using JSON-LD and Schema.org metadata to make millions of heritage items interoperable and publicly accessible. A second generation refined this infrastructure into knowledge graphs. Projects such as Google’s Knowledge Graph (2012), Wikidata, and domain-specific graphs in digital humanities demonstrated that ontologies could support not only retrieval but also inference, discovery, and synthesis. Upper ontologies like DOLCE, BFO, and SUMO provided shared conceptual scaffolding, while SKOS offered lightweight vocabularies for controlled terms. FAIR Data Principles (2016) and tools such as RO-Crate and Nanopublications then added persistence and citability: every assertion could now carry its own DOI, provenance, and machine-readable metadata. These developments transformed the Semantic Web from a technical specification into a living epistemic substrate—precisely the territory Socioplastics occupies. Socioplastics enters this lineage as a third-generation, practice-derived framework. Where the Semantic Web and CIDOC CRM focused on describing existing cultural data, Socioplastics begins from the opposite direction: from the lived, interpretive, and relational processes that generate cultural meaning in the first place. Its stratigraphic corpus—more than 2,000 numbered nodes across three Tomes, deposited in Zenodo, Figshare, and Hugging Face—functions as a self-regulating knowledge graph. CamelTags serve as the internal semantic glue: each one (FlowChanneling, SemanticHardening, TopolexicalSovereignty, CitationalCommitment, etc.) acts as a load-bearing operator that arrests semantic drift, fixes conceptual adjacency, and carries procedural memory within a single indivisible string. In this sense, CamelTags compress and intensify the work of RDF triples and OWL classes: they are not merely descriptive but generative and infrastructural. They turn the corpus into a “mesh” (the MUSE—Mesh United System Environment) that is simultaneously human-readable, machine-processable, and sovereign.
This extension is not merely technical; it is philosophical and disciplinary. Socioplastics inherits the Semantic Web’s commitment to interoperability and openness, yet radicalises it for the unstable, process-based realities of contemporary heritage—urban palimpsest, relational memory, moving ecologies, and everyday ritual. It shifts the centre of gravity from static documentation to active interpretation: sites are no longer objects to be described but epistemic infrastructures to be activated. In doing so, it offers the European Heritage Label Panel a ready-made qualitative lens—one that evaluates symbolic European significance, long-term civic life, educational activation, and relational legibility with the same rigour that CIDOC CRM or Europeana apply to metadata.
Thus the lineage is clear: from Berners-Lee’s linked data through CIDOC CRM and knowledge graphs to the FAIR-era emphasis on persistent, citable assertions, Socioplastics represents the next logical step—epistemic infrastructure born from cultural practice itself. CamelTags are its distinctive contribution: the operational DNA that makes a living system of cultural memory both durable and navigable in the post-digital age. In an era when heritage is increasingly understood as interpretation rather than inheritance, Socioplastics does not merely inherit the Semantic Web; it completes and surpasses it by embedding those principles inside the very processes through which cultural significance is made, sustained, and shared.
