Description:

The PARTHENOS Entities (PE) propose an ontological model and RDF schema to encode data of use in supporting the activities and aims of research infrastructures to pool and connect services, software, datasets and to enable users of such services to reach the actors and understand the knowledge generation processes which generated the offered datasets. Research infrastructures integrate highly heterogeneous resources for an often equally heterogeneous public. A central component of the activity of and RI in a digital environment involves building a data model that will support intuitive and accurate recall of information produced within the domain supported. It is the implicit or explicit belief of communities that organize into RIs that the integration of data from different members of the community offers not only the possibility of more efficient research and knowledge sharing but also the asking and answering of new questions by the crossing of data by sections of the community that normally would not consider their data in relation. Within this frame, PE proposes an ontological model that tries to capture the general basic entities deployed in building RI registries which is offered both as an intellectual tool for the checking and generation of such models and also as a means to create a common expression by which data could be shared across research communities, thus creating an RI of RIs. Such an effort is a logical extension of the belief inherent to individual research communities but broadened to an interdisciplinary scale.

PE is modelled as an extension of CIDOC CRM, the ISO standard ontology for cultural heritage data, and CRMdig, an extension of the latter which models provenance information in digitization processes. In this way, the modelling of a minimal metadata set for use in a registry as proposed above can be complimented by full modelling of detailed datasets in order to provide a rich web of data that can be accessed from the starting point of an RI registry. CIDOC CRM with its open extension policy and support of analytic data generated by empirical sciences with regards to the human past provides a suitably general ontology to allow for the integration of data across a wide spread of humanities and scientific disciplines.