We present a Cultural Heritage conceptual data model built under the European INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) Directive. Our model develops the Data Specification on Protected Sites, part of the INSPIRE Annex I. Hence its orientation towards georeferenced heritage data.

The data model has been developed by an interdisciplinary group made up of specialists in the field of Geomatics and Cultural Heritage. It is our aim to achieve a generic, extendable and interoperable schema. It should be generic enough to embrace all kind of protected heritage data, from an ancient pilgrim’s way to the last artifact found in an archaeological excavation, extendable to allow any kind of data producer to adapt the model to the nature of their own information and interoperable to combine spatial data sets from different sources through network services, via Internet.

The achievement of these three characteristics features international norms and standards referred to our kind of data. This implies adaptation to INSPIRE as well as to several ISO norms: ISO 19100 series regarding geographical information, ISO 21127 (CIDOC-CRM Model) for heritage thematic data and ISO 15836 (Dublin Core) for document resources.

The data model comprehends two main dimensions: cultural entities in a strict sense, and the legislative figures created to protect them. This allows for the representation of cultural objects (i.e. historical buildings or archaeological sites) and their link to their legislative protection, keeping them as separate realities.

In order to describe the data model, an international common language has been used: UML (Unified Modeling Language), a standard itself. Thus, we present a class-diagram depicting all legal and cultural entities, in the form of classes with their corresponding relations, attributes, constraints and stereotypes.