This CIDOC CRM integration introduces high-level classes and properties commonly required in humanities and social sciences research. The epistemological foundations of this ontology are presented in the following publications:

• Beretta Francesco, "Conceptualising Information Production in the Context of the SDHSS Ontology Ecosystem", Methodos : savoirs et textes 24, 16.12.2024. Accessible online: https://doi.org/10.4000/12xqn
• Francesco Beretta, "Semantic Data for Humanities and Social Sciences (SDHSS): an Ecosystem of CIDOC CRM Extensions for Research Data Production and Reuse", in: Professorale Karrieremuster, Leipzig, Open-Access-Hochschulverlag, 2024, pp. 73‑102. Accessible online: https://doi.org/10.33968/9783966270502-05.

John Searle conceptualizes an intention-in-action, i.e. the intention during the realization of the action, as an "actual event" — although it happens in the mind. He therefore distinguishes two components in an intentional action: "an intention-in-action and a bodily movement" (Making the Social World, 33-34). Intentional events can be conceptualized as a phenomenon located in one or more minds and accompanying the physical actions related to it. They are therefore modelled as a subclass of Intention.

Cf. the example on p. 36, "Raising my right hand in that circumstance constitutes voting. I vote by way of raising my hand": the intention is voting, the action is raising the hand but could be a different one. So the intentional event is about expressing a vote and this can be realised through different actions.

"The proposition is the content of the intention, the intended entity its object. The content of the intention can be a fragment of proposition or complex sets of propositions." Cf. Searle John, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization, Oxford University Press, 2010, 27-32.

This class is conceptualized in relation to the standard notions in sociology and social psychology of socialization and social representations.

• "Social representations", "Socialization", in: Thomas Teo (ed.). Encyclopedia of critical psychology. New York: Springer Reference, 2014.
• Thompson Michael J, "Collective Intentionality, Social Domination, and Reification ". Journal of Social Ontology 3, n^o 2 (1st June 2017): 207‑29, https://doi.org/10.1515/jso-2016-0017.

In the Descriptions and Situations ontology the present class is conceptualized as a  "Knowledge community [i.e.] a collection of agents unified by descriptions that are shared by the member agents". (Gangemi Aldo, « Norms and plans as unification criteria for social collectives. », Auton. Agents Multi Agent Syst. 17 (1), 2008, pp. 70‑112, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-008-9038-9. )

The intension of this class is defined in accordance with the view distinguishing between the intentional content of the state of mind (a representation) and the type of state or psychological mode.

Cf. John Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 27.

Additional examples in relation with the sdh:C27 Intention class:

About the concept of connotation:

• "[psychological attitudes] are constructions from one particular (i.e., Western) indigenous psychology that necessarily will take on different connotations in other cultures, if they are transferable at all", Encyclopedia of critical psychology, p.350.
• "the act of connoting; the suggesting of an additional meaning for a word or expression, apart from its explicit meaning." (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/connotation)

[To be reviewed] The propositional situation corresponds to the notion of situation that is part of the D&S ontology (Gangemi Aldo et Mika Peter, « Understanding the Semantic Web through Descriptions and Situations », in: On The Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2003: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE, vol. 2888, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2003, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-39964-3_44, pp. 689‑706)

About the "Central Problem": a. Collective intentionality is no simple summation of individual intentionality (the Irreducibility Claim); b. Collective intentionality is had by the participating individuals, intentionality is their own (the Individual Ownership Claim, see Schweikard, David P. and Hans Bernhard Schmid, "Collective Intentionality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/collective-intentionality/>.

This class is conceptualised, in a foundational perspective, in reference to the DOLCE Amount of Matter class and therefore disjoint with the crm:E19 Physical Object and crm:E26 Physical Feature classes, while the crm:E18 Physical Thing class, the parent of the three former classes, corresponds to the Physical Endurant class in DOLCE.

Amendments version 1.2.4 - 39th meeting of the CIDOC CRM (9 - 12 October, 2017, Heraklion) : "State is deleted from CRM sci and should be part of CRM inf." From the minutes, about issue "ISSUE 332 Properties of S10 Material Substantial of CRMsci" : "State is a construct of how long a thing did not change and should go to CRMinf"

The class State disappeared from the CRMsci extention in version Version 1.2.5, May 2018. The O14 initializes property remains in that version.

It was removed in the 44th meeting in Paris, cf. Issue 414: CRMsci O14 initializes

In CRMarchaeo, v. 1.4.8 (March 2019) : "Superclass of class At Embedding modified since S16 State is now deprecated" New superclass:  E3 Condition State. A7 Embedding became a subclass of A8 Sratigraphic Volume Unit in February 2022, 52nd Meeting: Issue 447: A7 Embedding as a Physical Feature like entity

A move is conceptualized as an activity if the focus is on the actor but it can be conceptualized as a physical displacement if the focus is on the moved thing.

The person(s) carrying out the move can be associated with the inherited crm:P14 carried out by  property or by using the sdh-so:C15 Participation class with an appropriate role which makes it possible to represent different times of participation in the displacement of the object and more complex situations.

If the displacement concerns a person, and it is voluntary, such as a walk or a trip, the object moved and the actor responsible for the displacement are the same. The person moving, which is the physical object that is moved, will be associated using the crm:P25 moved property and the identiy of this kind of displacement will be provided by appropriate crm:E9 Move types. In these cases, the association of the same person with the crm:P14 carried out by property is not needed.

In a foundational perspective, this class is equivalent to the Physical Endurant class in DOLCE, cf. Stefano Borgo et al., ‘DOLCE: A Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering’, Applied Ontology, 2022, 1–25 <https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-210259>. It is therefore to be considered as a sibling and disjoint class of the crm:E28 Conceptual Object class, equivalent to Non-physical Endurant in DOLCE. 

In the Descriptions and Situations ontology the Group class is conceptualized as an  "Intentional collective [i.e.] a knowledge community that is unified by a plan shared by member agents.". (Gangemi Aldo, « Norms and plans as unification criteria for social collectives. », Auton. Agents Multi Agent Syst. 17 (1), 2008, pp. 70‑112, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-008-9038-9. )

Porello et al. analyse some foundational aspects of groups and group agency to conclude that groups are based on membership norms shared by the participants and that group agency furthermore demands acknowledgment of formal procedures to take decisions by delegation of other members (Porello Daniele, Bottazzi Emanuele et Ferrario Roberta, « The Ontology of Group Agency. », in: Formal Ontology in Information Systems-Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference, FOIS 2014, September, 22-25, 2014, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2014, pp. 183‑196, https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-438-1-183).

In the SDHSS ontology ecosystem, the ontological substance of a group is considered to lie in the representations of the members of the group that share a plan, however rudimentary, and accept to integrate their individual agency into the group in order to realize collective agency, even if in a very informal way. The specific roles of individuals or sub-groups (e.g. steering comittee, president, etc.) will be expressed using the sdh-so:C13 Social Role Embodiment class.

In terms of its information content, this property should have the sdh:C6 [Abstract Class] Social Quality as its domain. However, given that every type is socially constructed, it has the more abstract class crm:E55 Type as its domain.

• Gangemi 2022: Gangemi, Aldo, Nicola Guarino, Claudio Masolo, Alessandro Oltramari and Luc Schneider ‘Sweetening Ontologies with DOLCE’. In Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: Ontologies and the Semantic Web, edited by Asunción Gómez-Pérez and V. Richard Benjamins, 166–181. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45810-7_18.

Relevant documentation for conceptualizing this class:

• "Collective Intentionality" – Schweikard, David P. and Hans Bernhard Schmid, "Collective Intentionality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/collective-intentionality/>.(Retireved 7 November 2020)
• Social representation (Wikipedia, English version, retrieved 7 November 2020)

The class sdh:C1 Quality is situated in the taxonomy of classes at the same level as crm:E3 Condition or State and crm:E4 Period, both child classes of crm:E2 Temporal Entity. In fact, a careful ontological analysis shows that, strictly speaking, it is the class crm:E4 Period (or even more the class crmE5 Event) that corresponds to the class Perdurant in DOLCE, and not crm:E2 Temporal Entity, because no property of the latter associates it with objects or physical space, and therefore it only represents the temporal dimension of phenomena. At the same time, we observe that the crm:E2 Temporal Entity class is also a parent of crm:E3 Condition or State class, which appears to be equivalent to the sdh:C1 Quality class, albeit with a restriction to physical objects. The proposed modelling approach thus complies with the DOLCE's conceptualisation in defining the two classes crm:E4 Period (perdurant) and sdh:C1 Quality (quality-quale) as children of the crm:E2 Temporal Entity class. Of course the formalisation of the sdh:C1 class is different from that of DOLCE which expresses the association to a quale using a time-indexed property.

Qualities appear to be epistemic in the sense that the definition of their temporal extent, and thus their identity, is generally observer-dependent rather than intrinsic, although they are essentially observable phenomena. The epistemic dimension of qualities is also specific to physical features, regardless of the fact that these two classes are disjoint. Indeed, as stated in the CRM scope note of the crm:E26 Physical Feature class (versons 6.2 ez 7.1.2), features are defined as "fiat objects" which amounts to saying that their identity and extent is defined by the observers.

This way of modelling social representations is inspired by the notion of 'description' in the Descriptions and situations ontology (WonderWeb Project, Deliverable 18). Descriptions are sets of propositions and related concepts that rediscribe states of affairs in the world according to a specific point of view. They can be expressed in oral or written form, in different languages or wording but insofar as they have the same intentional content they have the same identity. Examples of descriptions are social rules and fonctions, plans, laws, projects, scripts, techniques, etc. They are not given in 'nature', in the sense of physics or biology, but originate from social life and in the communication that is the basis of it.

In historical research, social representations (as 'descriptions') should be modelled as representing the collective intentionality of the societies being studied, note the ones of the researchers. It is therefore important to apply in modelling the principle of 'critical distance' in order to avoid anachronism.