Description:

Definition of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model

Introduction

This document is the formal definition of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (“CRM”), a formal ontology intended to facilitate the integration, mediation and interchange of heterogeneous cultural heritage information. The CRM is the culmination of more than a decade of standards development work by the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Work on the CRM itself began in 1996 under the auspices of the ICOM-CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group. Since 2000, development of the CRM has been officially delegated by ICOM-CIDOC to the CIDOC CRM Special Interest Group, which collaborates with the ISO working group ISO/TC46/SC4/WG9 to bring the CRM to the form and status of an International Standard.

Objectives of the CIDOC CRM

The primary role of the CRM is to enable information exchange and integration between heterogeneous sources of cultural heritage information. It aims at providing the semantic definitions and clarifications needed to transform disparate, localised information sources into a coherent global resource, be it within a larger institution, in intranets or on the Internet. Its perspective is supra-institutional and abstracted from any specific local context. This goal determines the constructs and level of detail of the CRM.

More specifically, it defines and is restricted to the underlying semantics of database schemata and document structures used in cultural heritage and museum documentation in terms of a formal ontology. It does not define any of the terminology appearing typically as data in the respective data structures; however it foresees the characteristic relationships for its use. It does not aim at proposing what cultural institutions should document. Rather it explains the logic of what they actually currently document, and thereby enables semantic interoperability.

It intends to provide a model of the intellectual structure of cultural documentation in logical terms. As such, it is not optimised for implementation-specific storage and processing aspects. Implementations may lead to solutions where elements and links between relevant elements of our conceptualizations are no longer explicit in a database or other structured storage system. For instance the birth event that connects elements such as father, mother, birth date, birth place may not appear in the database, in order to save storage space or response time of the system. The CRM allows us to explain how such apparently disparate entities are intellectually interconnected, and how the ability of the database to answer certain intellectual questions is affected by the omission of such elements and links.

The CRM aims to support the following specific functionalities:

• Inform developers of information systems as a guide to good practice in conceptual modelling, in order to effectively structure and relate information assets of cultural documentation.
• Serve as a common language for domain experts and IT developers to formulate requirements and to agree on system functionalities with respect to the correct handling of cultural contents.
• To serve as a formal language for the identification of common information contents in different data formats; in particular to support the implementation of automatic data transformation algorithms from local to global data structures without loss of meaning. The latter being useful for data exchange, data migration from legacy systems, data information integration and mediation of heterogeneous sources.
• To support associative queries against integrated resources by providing a global model of the basic classes and their associations to formulate such queries.
• It is further believed, that advanced natural language algorithms and case-specific heuristics can take significant advantage of the CRM to resolve free text information into a formal logical form, if that is regarded beneficial. The CRM is however not thought to be a means to replace scholarly text, rich in meaning, by logical forms, but only a means to identify related data.

Users of the CRM should be aware that the definition of data entry systems requires support of community-specific terminology, guidance to what should be documented and in which sequence, and application-specific consistency controls. The CRM does not provide such notions.

By its very structure and formalism, the CRM is extensible and users are encouraged to create extensions for the needs of more specialized communities and applications.

Scope of the CIDOC CRM

The overall scope of the CIDOC CRM can be summarised in simple terms as the curated knowledge of museums. However, a more detailed and useful definition can be articulated by defining both the Intended Scope, a broad and maximally- inclusive definition of general application principles, and the Practical Scope, which is expressed by the overall scope of a reference set of specific identifiable museum documentation standards and practices that the CRM aims to encompass, however restricted in its details to the limitations of the Intended Scope.

• The Intended Scope of the CRM may be defined as all information required for the exchange and integration of heterogeneous scientific documentation of museum collections. This definition requires further elaboration:
• The term “scientific documentation” is intended to convey the requirement that the depth and quality of descriptive information that can be handled by the CRM should be sufficient for serious academic research. This does not mean that information intended for presentation to members of the general public is excluded, but rather that the CRM is intended to provide the level of detail and precision expected and required by museum professionals and researchers in the field.
• The term “museum collections” is intended to cover all types of material collected and displayed by museums and related institutions, as defined by ICOM 1 . This includes collections, sites and monuments relating to fields such as social history, ethnography, archaeology, fine and applied arts, natural history, history of sciences and technology.
• The documentation of collections includes the detailed description of individual items within collections, groups of items and collections as a whole. The CRM is specifically intended to cover contextual information: the historical, geographical and theoretical background that gives museum collections much of their cultural significance and value.
• The exchange of relevant information with libraries and archives, and the harmonisation of the CRM with their models, falls within the Intended Scope of the CRM.
• Information required solely for the administration and management of cultural institutions, such as information relating to personnel, accounting, and visitor statistics, falls outside the Intended Scope of the CRM.

The Practical Scope of the CRM is expressed in terms of the current reference standards for museum documentation that have been used to guide and validate the CRM’s development. The CRM covers the same domain of discourse as the union of these reference standards; this means that data correctly encoded according to these museum documentation standards there can be a CRM-compatible expression that conveys the same meaning.