Description:

This document represents the formal specification for an unofficial formal extension of the CIDOC CRM designed for application in the area of art and architectural historical research. The scope of this extension is to support art and architectural research in the sense of the study of primary and secondary documents for the derivation, manually and programmatically, of historically contextual facts that can be used to support reflection and structured argumentation. The core expressivity that this extension adds is the ability to accurately express historically bound, contextual social facts relative to the agents holding those beliefs and the temporal period for which those beliefs were valid. The extension enables this expressivity by introducing the notions of institutional fact and speech act as core modelling concepts. Institutional facts are collective beliefs about the world held by groups for a period of time. Such collective beliefs while subjectively grounded are epistemically objective for the community over which they hold sway. Introducing the notion of institutional fact allows for a specialization of the core CRM to be able to express these social realities (expressed in simple, aoristic binary properties in the core CRM) in their full social complexity as temporally and socially bound beliefs. The concomitant core notion introduced in this extension is the idea of Speech Act in the Austinian and Serlean sense. A speech act is a kind of intentional event (E7 Activity of CRM base) in which agents purposefully apply a rule and perform a set practice in order to bring about a new social state or institutional fact. Introducing the notion of speech act provides both a high level ontological category and set of relations for describing the kinds of events which are the cause of institutional facts as well as providing a starting point for the analysis of the non truth propositional use of information objects. In speech acts, information objects (e.g. phrases and formulae) are deployed not to convey states of the world but to generate states of the world. The subject of historical investigation is not simply the bare facts available to an empirical analysis of the physical world but involves an investigation of the social activities which generated contexts of understanding and belief that may differ significantly across times and peoples. Materializing the social facts implicit in CRM base as explicit institutional facts gives them a richer ontological representation and offers a consistent epistemological approach to their study by recognizing social, negotiated facts as objective realities in themselves and treating them as first order entities of study. This involves a departure from the aims of CRM base which is guided by an information integration functionality which favours the representation of the latest state of knowledge in a presentist perspective. In the study of the history of art and architecture it is in no small part the different non-coinciding facts held or supported by different actors over different times which are of interest. The materialization of institutional facts supports the information management functionality which guides this informal extension of the CIDOC CRM and which aims to support historians in representing the positive knowledge they can gather from primary and secondary sources of evidence of both past simple and institutional facts for the purposes of proposing hypotheses and analyses of texts, authors, periods, works and so on. In this regard, CRMaaa also provides an initial limited set of classes for describing traditional and digital methods of deriving facts from texts, in order to support the linking of contemporary research processes as provenance nodes for the different data points of simple and institutional facts which they generate in the course of their research.

Examples Used

With this in mind, examples have been chosen which potentially support a variety of social facts. Some of these facts, i.e., those held by one group of people at some time or other, may directly contradict another, i.e., that held by a different group of people at some potentially different time. Most of the examples have been reused across different types of social fact, in order to tell more completely the history of the objects in question and the beliefs that have been held about them by specific groups of people over a given period of time. These histories can in themselves be quite complex. References are thus provided for further contextualization. These appear in brackets following the examples, like so:

• The Ownership Status (ZE8) of the Gʼpsgolox totem pole (E22) as 'has current owner' the Haisla people (E74) from 1872 - 2012 holds for the Haisla people (E74) and as 'has current owner' the Swedish National Museum of Ethnography (E74) from 1929 - 2006 holds for the Swedish Polity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%CA%BCpsgolox_totem_pole)

Compatibility and Nomenclature

This unofficial extension of the CIDOC CRM is formulated in relation to:

• CIDOC CRM v.7.1.2
• CIDOC CRM Dig v.4.0

The specification consists of a set of declarations for formalized classes and properties that extend the CIDOC CRM and the above official extensions. 

Adopting the conventions of the CIDOC CRM each class and property have been given an identifier in addition to their names. The naming convention adopted for this extension is:

ZE = class

ZP = property

The choice of these names was arbitrary, making a conceptual connection with the official CRM representation while clearly distinguishing the new classes and properties from those of either CRM base or its official extensions.

Namespace

https://takin.solutions/ontologies/crmaaa 

Maintenance and Archiving

CRMaaa is an actively maintained ontology. It is our aim to develop publicaly and participatively, learning from and engaging with the scholarly community that adopts it. Towards this end we maintain the ontology with the following processes and relative tools.

Ontology Development

We adopt the OntoMe tool developed by LARHRA to manage the ontology and produce editions. This ensures a consistent management of the ontology and provides a public space to engage in revisions.

The maintenace space for the ontology can be found here: https://ontome.net/project/69 

Please note, at time of publishing, OntoME is not capable of producing complete, provenanced RDF serializations, so please only use the official RDF for this standard stored on our github. See below. 

Issue Management and Revision Storage

We adopt github as a platform for inviting and managing issues related to the ontology as well as providing an active place to be able to access the latest edition of the ontology, its specification and relevant documentation.

The address for the github repository is: https://github.com/takinsolutions/crmaaa 

Acknowledgements

The initiative for creating, developing and maintaining this ontology is made possible by important on-going funding and institutional commitment, which is gratefully acknowledged here.

Funding Support

• The development of the initial version (v0.9) of CRMaaa was initiated and generously funded by ETH Zurich, Chair of the History and Theory of Architecture, Prof. Maarten Delbeke.
• The  continuted development and enrichment of the latest version (v1.5) has been generously funded as part of the Open Research Data (ORD) initiative by swissuniversities.

Institutional Support

The continuous maintenance and promotion of CRMaaa is made possible by the initial commitment of its partners to maintain the ontology and promote its understanding and adoption.

• Swiss Art Research Infrastructure - University of Zurich
• Takin.solutions

Status:

Reference namespaces:

CIDOC CRM version 7.1.3

CRMdig version 4.0

Contributors:

Version: