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The advent of the Semantic Web and Linked Data initiative has contributed to new perspectives and opportunities regarding cultural heritage conservation. Museums have extensive collections of Chinese ceramic vases in China. Although some data sources have been digitized, the vision of cultural heritage institutions is not only to display objects and simple descriptions (drawn from metadata), but also to allow for understanding relationships between objects (created by semantically interrelated metadata). The key to achieving this goal is to utilize the technologies of the Semantic Web, whose core is Ontology. The focus of this paper is to describe the construction of the TAO CI ("ceramics" in Chinese) ontology and terminology of the domain of ceramic vases of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. The theoretical framework relies on the notion of essential characteristics. This notion is compliant with the ISO principles on Terminology (ISO 1087 and 704), according to which a concept is defined as a combination of essential characteristics, and with the Aristotelian definition in terms of genus and differentia. This approach is intuitive for domain experts and requires identifying essential characteristics, combining them into concepts, and translating the result into a Semantic Web language. This article proposes an approach based on a morphological analysis of the Chinese terms for vases to identify essential characteristics and a term-guided method for defining concepts. Such a term-and-characteristic guided approach makes ontology engineering less dependent on formal languages and does not require a background in Description Logics. The research presented in this article aims to publish the resulting structured data on the Semantic Web for the use of anybody interested, including museums hosting collections of these vessels, and enrich existing domain ontology building methodologies. To our knowledge, there are no comprehensive ontologies for Chinese ceramic vases. TAO CI ontology remedies this gap and provides a reference for ontology building in other domains of Chinese cultural heritage. The TAO CI ontology is openly accessible here: http://www.dh.ketrc.com/otcontainer/data/otc.owl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]