CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model
The
History
The CIDOC CRM emerged from the CIDOC Documentation Standards Group
Aims
The overall aim of the CIDOC CRM is to provide a reference model and information standard that museums, and other cultural heritage institutions, can use to describe their collections, and related business entities, to improve information sharing.
The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) provides definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation...to promote a shared understanding of cultural heritage information by providing a common and extensible semantic framework that any cultural heritage information can be mapped to. It is intended to be a common language for domain experts and implementers to formulate requirements for information systems and to serve as a guide for good practice of conceptual modelling. In this way, it can provide the "semantic glue" needed to mediate between different sources of cultural heritage information, such as that published by museums, libraries and archives.[3]
By adopting
Following the successful standardization of the CIDOC CRM, a new initiative, FRBRoo, was begun in 2006 to harmonize it with the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). The aim of this initiative is to "provide a formal ontology intended to capture and represent the underlying semantics of bibliographic information and to facilitate the integration, mediation, and interchange of bibliographic and museum information."[6][7]
Ontology
The "CIDOC object-oriented Conceptual Reference Model" (CRM) is a domain ontology, but includes its own version of an upper ontology.
The core classes cover:[8]
- Space-Time
- includes title/identifier, place, era/period, time-span, and relationship to persistent items
- Events
- includes title/identifier, beginning/ending of existence, participants (people, either individually or in groups), creation/modification of things (physical or conceptional), and relationship to persistent items
- Material Things
- includes title/identifier, place, the information object the material thing carries, part-of relationships, and relationship to persistent items
- Immaterial Things
- includes title/identifier, information objects (propositional or symbolic), conceptional things, and part-of relationships
Examples of definitions:[9]
- Persistent Item
- a physical or conceptional item that has a persistent identity recognized within the duration of its existence by its identification rather than by its continuity or by observation. A Persistent Item is comparable to an endurant.
- Temporal Entity
- includes events, eras/periods, and condition states which happen over a limited extent in time, and is disjoint with Persistent Item. A Temporal Entity is comparable to a perdurant.
- Propositional Object
- a set of statements about real or imaginary things.
- Symbolic Object
- a sign/symbol or an aggregation of signs/symbols.
CIDOC CRM Implementations and Systems
- The CIDOC CRM has been implemented in OWL DL as Erlangen CRM/OWL (ECRM)
- The ECRM (and thus CIDOC CRM) is used extensively in the WissKI system, an ontology based virtual research environment for managing primary research data in the area of cultural heritage as linked data.
References
- ^ Information and documentation — A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information
- ^ CIDOC Documentation Standards Group[permanent dead link]
- ^ CIDOC CRM Homepage
- ^ "CIDOC CRM Tools and RDF mappings". Archived from the original on 2007-06-14. Retrieved 2007-06-09.
- ^ "CIDOC CRM Applications". Archived from the original on 2007-06-13. Retrieved 2007-06-09.
- ^ FRBoo Introduction Archived 2007-06-16 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Martin Doerr, Patrick LeBoeuf, Modelling Intellectual Processes: The FRBR-CRM Harmonization, CIDOC Conference, September 11, 2006, Gothenburg, Sweden" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-07-26. Retrieved 2007-06-09.
- CIDOC. Archived from the originalon 2013-10-21. Retrieved 2013-10-20.
- CIDOC. November 2011.
Further reading
- Doerr M., "The CIDOC CRM – An Ontological Approach to Semantic Interoperability of Metadata", AI Magazine, Volume.24, Number 3 pp. 75–92 (2003)
- Martin Doerr, Dolores Iorizzo, The Dream of a Global Knowledge Network – A New Approach, ACM Journal for Computing and Cultural Heritage, Vol. 1, No. 1, Article 5, Publication date: June 2008
- Nick Crofts, Martin Doerr, Tony Gill, Stephen Stead, Matthew Stiff (editors), Definition of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, October 2006. Version 4.2.1
- Martin Doerr, Nicholas Crofts: Electronic Communication on Diverse Data. The Role of the oo CIDOC Reference Model
- T. Gill: Making sense of cultural infodiversity: The CIDOC-CRM. 2002
- Regine Stein, Jürgen Gottschewski u.a.: Das CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model: Eine Hilfe für den Datenaustausch? Berlin, 2005 (German)
- Görz, G.; Schiemann, B.; Oischinger, M.: An Implementation of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (4.2.4) in OWL-DL); Proceedings CIDOC 2008 - The Digital Curation of Cultural Heritage