Definition

The set of resources related to a single cultural heritage object that collectively represents that object in Europeana. Such set consists of: all descriptions about the object that Europeana collects from (possibly different) content providers, including thumbnails and other forms of abstractions, as well as of the description of the object Europeana builds.

Obligation & Occurrence

The relation between the cultural heritage objects represented in Europeana and the instances of the class edm:EuropeanaAggregation is one-to-one, in the data maintained by Europeana: every cultural heritage object is represented by an instance of edm:EuropeanaAggregation, and every instance of edm:EuropeanaAggregation represents a cultural heritage object.

Comment

This class is used in Europeana to gather in a single conceptual unit all the information about a cultural heritage object, necessary for all operations on these objects. An instance of EuropeanaAggregation is created at ingestion time for each different cultural heritage object recognized by Europeana. Such instance is associated to the cultural heritage object that it is about, by the property edm:aggregatedCHO

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.

The Heritage Text Ontology is designed to represent the knowledge in textual heritage. It describes a set of classes, properties, and restrictions that can be used to represent content and metadata of digitised historical textual collections. It can also capture the provenance information of digital contents and concepts. This helps to track not only the sources where same concepts appeared, but also how textual data was digitised and extracted.

"READ-IT (Reading Europe Advanced Data Investigation Tool) is a 3-years (2018-2020) transnational, interdisciplinary R&D project funded by the Joint Programming Initiative for Cultural Heritage that will build a unique large-scale, user-friendly, open access, semantically-enriched investigation tool to identify and share groundbreaking evidence about 18th-21st century Cultural Heritage of reading in Europe".

The Reading Experience Ontology is one of the outcome of READ-IT project.

Definition

A persistent physical item such as a painting, a building, a book or a stone. Persons are not items. This class represents cultural heritage objects known to Europeana to be physical things (such as Mona Lisa) as well as all physical things Europeana refers to in the descriptions of cultural heritage objects (such as the Rosetta Stone).

Comment

Physical things are identified by the content provider or by Europeana at enrichment time. This class is the domain of edm:realizes

What is CRMsoc

CRMsoc is an extension to the CIDOC CRM aimed at expanding the expressivity of the standard relative to the representation of conventionally grounded, socially constructed facts and their foundation in intentionality. In historical and social sciences, and increasingly in cultural heritage studies as they encounter the challenges of the decolonialist turn, it is typical to record and analyze the context which grounds and supports the commitment to socially constituted facts (names, memberships, ownership, rights, classifications, etc.). For facts which are established by convention as opposed to pure spatio-temporal facts, it is typically important for historical research to record the constituent actors, events, social conventions and the temporal boundaries which ground and characterize their original constitution and which support their continued existence. The purpose of this extension is thus to enable the representation and exchange of information regarding the social context and identity of conventional facts and the intentionality of actors for the exchange of said information in an objective and uniform manner.

CRMsoc provides an extension and overlay of CRMbase that delivers an intention-centric extension of temporal classes for the representation of the commitment of individuals and social groups to conventional facts as well as enabling the modelling of the conventional actions which establish or de-establish such facts.

What is the idea?

Historians, social scientists and cultural heritage specialists record and are concerned to understand, track and explain the evolution of socially constituted facts and other intentional phenomena like reading, discussing or voting. Conventionally attributed facts have a different ontological nature to physically established facts, being grounded in the communal epistemic commitment of a group to ‘something being the case’ called ‘social or collective representations’ in contemporary social sciences. The notion of intentionality, of taking something to be the case in the context of specific social representations, is called upon to allow the modelling of a rich set of relations required by researchers to understand when a fact or intentional phenomenon was the case, for whom and under what conditions. This extension thus allows the argumentation over empirically retrievable facts regarding the conventional agreement of groups about characteristics of entities over time and how these facts were established, maintained or de-established. 

This extension thus enriches the overall expressivity of CIDOC CRM for researchers and professionals for whom the parameters of the establishment of social fact are an object of direct study or have direct impact on their understanding of wider networks of knowledge. It is based on standard concepts in social philosophy and social psychology, notably the notions of intentionality and social representations, in order to propose a comprehensive perspective and without adopting the viewpoint of a specific author or school of thought.

Reference literature (selection):

Gallotti Mattia and Michael John (éds.), Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition, Dordrecht, Springer Netherlands, 2014.

Sammut Gordon et al. (éds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Social Representations, Cambridge, University Press, 2015.

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

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) (online) (especially entries: Collective Intentionality, Mental Representation, Consciousness and Intentionality, Social Norms, etc.)

Thomas T. (ed.), Encyclopedia of critical psychology (New York: Springer Reference, 2014) (especially entries: Interobjectivity; Social Constructionism; Social Representations; Socialisation).

LRMoo takes its functional scope from the scope of the IFLA Library Reference Model. It aims to be a high-level conceptual reference model for bibliographic information managed by libraries of all kinds. As with IFLA LRM, it covers bibliographic data, which is broadly understood to include metadata traditionally considered strictly bibliographic as well as metadata viewed as name or subject authority data. Basic holdings information, to the extent that it appears in IFLA LRM, is included via constructs existing in CIDOC CRM. However, administrative metadata used to manage the internal functions of libraries and bibliographic agencies is excluded from the scope of LRMOO, as it is also excluded by both IFLA LRM and CIDOC CRM.

The LRMoo model includes all classes and properties required, in addition to classes and properties already declared in CIDOC CRM, to express the concepts covered by IFLA LRM. Unlike in FRBRoo, no classes that are exact equivalences of CIDOC CRM classes are declared, even when those classes are required as direct equivalences to IFLA LRM classes. LRMoo is strictly an extension of CIDOC CRM and cannot be implemented without using key classes and properties from CIDOC CRM.

LRMOO only expands on IFLA LRM in a few limited areas. The situation where a work incorporates a pre-existing work so that all of its expressions must include an expression of the first work is modelled with two specific properties, R75 incorporates (is incorporated in) between the works and R74 uses expression of (has expression used in) between the expressions. Additionally, LRMoo provides for grouping works that share a common concept, such as being set in the same fictional universe, an idea that has often been discussed under the term “superwork”, through the property R10 is member of (has member) which links a work to the CIDOC CRM class E28 Conceptual Object. And finally, LRMoo includes modelling of performances with the class F31 Performance and the property R80 performed (is performed in) to link the performance event to the work performed. Recording performances is one type of expression creation and this is expressed with the property R81 recorded (is recorded in).

LRMoo is designed as an extension to the CIDOC CRM model which opens a route to semantic interoperability and exchange of data with other communities in the wider heritage sector. The family of models that use CIDOC CRM as a base is diverse and growing. The development methodology ensures each new  family model is compatible, which allows for multiple extensions to be adopted together, based on the needs of the implementation.

LRMoo does not include refinements for particular types of resources. All these aspects can be fully represented with more general supertypes in LRMoo or CIDOC CRM. Any extensions to IFLA LRM for resource types could be the object of further extensions to LRMoo.

LRMoo is a conceptual model and as such is primarily intended for a technical audience engaged in designing and implementing data structures that include bibliographic information, in particular when this is with the intention of enabling integration with data from other heritage communities. The adoption of object-oriented techniques makes the model suited for working with linked data and semantic web technologies. This document presumes basic familiarity with conceptual modelling and particularly with object-oriented formulations, the conventions adopted in CIDOC CRM and with IFLA LRM.

• The Classificatory Status (ZE4) of the assemblage of apatosaurus and camarasaurus remains (E19) as ‘has type’ Brontosaurus excelsus (E55) 1905 - Present holds for American Museum of Natural History (E74). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus)
• The Classificatory Status (ZE4) of the "French baguette" (E55) as 'has type' Intangible Cultural Heritage (E55) 2022 - Present holds for UNESCO (E74)(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63800674)

This class comprises sets of coherent phenomena or cultural manifestations occurring in time and space.

It is the social or physical coherence of these phenomena that identify an instance of E4 Period and not the associated spatiotemporal extent. This extent is only the “ground” or space in an abstract physical sense that the actual process of growth, spread and retreat has covered. Consequently, different periods can overlap and coexist in time and space, such as when a nomadic culture exists in the same area and time as a sedentary culture. This also means that overlapping land use rights, common among first nations, amounts to overlapping periods.

Often, this class is used to describe prehistoric or historic periods such as the “Neolithic Period”, the “Ming Dynasty” or the “McCarthy Era”, but also geopolitical units and activities of settlements are regarded as special cases of E4 Period. However, there are no assumptions about the scale of the associated phenomena. In particular all events are seen as synthetic processes consisting of coherent phenomena. Therefore, E4 Period is a superclass of E5 Event. For example, a modern clinical birth, an instance of E67 Birth, can be seen as both a single event, i.e., an instance of E5 Event, and as an extended period, i.e., an instance of E4 Period, that consists of multiple physical processes and complementary activities performed by multiple instances of E39 Actor.

As the actual extent of an instance of E4 Period in spacetime we regard the trajectories of the participating physical things during their participation in an instance of E4 Period. This includes the open spaces via which these things have interacted and the spaces by which they had the potential to interact during that period or event in the way defined by the type of the respective period or event. Examples include the air in a meeting room transferring the voices of the participants. Since these phenomena are fuzzy, we assume the spatiotemporal extent to be contiguous, except for cases of phenomena spreading out over islands or other separated areas, including geopolitical units distributed over disconnected areas such as islands or colonies.

Whether the trajectories necessary for participants to travel between these areas are regarded as part of the spatiotemporal extent or not has to be decided in each case based on a concrete analysis, taking use of the sea for other purposes than travel, such as fishing, into consideration. One may also argue that the activities to govern disconnected areas imply travelling through spaces connecting them and that these areas hence are spatially connected in a way, but it appears counterintuitive to consider for instance travel routes in international waters as extensions of geopolitical units.

Consequently, an instance of E4 Period may occupy a number of disjoint spacetime volumes, however there must not be a discontinuity in the time-span covered by these spacetime volumes. This means that an instance of E4 Period must be contiguous in time. If it has ended in all areas, it has ended as a whole. However, it may end in one area before another, such as in the Polynesian migration, and it continues as long as it is ongoing in at least one area.

We model E4 Period as a subclass of E2 Temporal Entity and of E92 Spacetime Volume. The latter is intended as a phenomenal spacetime volume as defined in CIDOC CRMgeo (Doerr & Hiebel, 2013). By virtue of this multiple inheritance, we can discuss the physical extent of an instance of E4 Period without representing each instance of it together with an instance of its associated spacetime volume. This model combines two quite different kinds of substance: an instance of E4 Period is a phenomenon while an instance of E92 Spacetime Volume is an aggregation of points in spacetime. However, the real spatiotemporal extent of an instance of E4 Period is regarded to be unique to it due to all its details and fuzziness; its identity and existence depends uniquely on the identity of the instance of E4 Period. Therefore, this multiple inheritance is unambiguous and effective and furthermore corresponds to the intuitions of natural language.

Typical use of this class in cultural heritage documentation is for documenting cultural and artistic periods. There are two different conceptualisations of ‘artistic style’, defined either by physical features or by historical context. For example, “Impressionism” can be viewed as a period in the European sphere of influence lasting from approximately 1870 to 1905 during which paintings with particular characteristics were produced by a group of artists that included (among others) Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and Degas. Alternatively, it can be regarded as a style applicable to all paintings sharing the characteristics of the works produced by the Impressionist painters, regardless of historical context. The first interpretation is an instance of E4 Period, and the second defines morphological object types that fall under E55 Type.

A geopolitical unit as a specific case of an instance of E4 Period is the set of activities and phenomena related to the claim of power, the consequences of belonging to a jurisdictional area and an administrative system that establishes a geopolitical unit. Examples from the modern period are countries or administrative areas of countries such as districts whose actions and structures define activities and phenomena in the area that they intend to govern. The borders of geopolitical units are often defined in contracts or treaties although they may deviate from the actual practice. The spatiotemporal properties of Geopolitical units can be modelled through the properties inherited from E92 Spacetime Volume.

Another specific case of an instance of E4 Period is the actual extent of the set of activities and phenomena as evidenced by their physical traces that define a settlement, such as the populated period of Nineveh.

This class includes actions for the classification of heritage objects of all kinds. This classification is based on the expertise and the personal opinion of the classifier.

• The Classificatory Status (ZE4) of the assemblage of apatosaurus and camarasaurus remains (E19) as ‘has type’ Brontosaurus excelsus (E55) 1905 - Present holds for American Museum of Natural History (E74). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus)
• The Classificatory Status (ZE4) of the "French baguette" (E55) as 'has type' Intangible Cultural Heritage (E55) 2022 - Present holds for UNESCO (E74)(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63800674)

Definition

This class includes the Cultural Heritage objects that Europeana collects descriptions about.

Comment

This class is the range of edm:aggregatedCHO. This class has been mostly motivated by the need to assign a type to the “central node” in the EDM pattern, related to the XML expression of EDM. It is intended as a functional type, that can be applied even in cases where edm:PhysicalThing cannot be used as the type of the resource standing for the real-world object “contributed” to Europeana (independently of any specific data contributor perspective). A resource of type ProvidedCHO can be the subject of statements using edm:isRelatedTo or any more specific property