the area covered by the World Heritage Site of Stonehenge (E53) falls within the area of Salisbury Plain (E53)

The CIDOC CRM has been developed in a manner that is intended to promote a shared understanding of cultural heritage information by providing a common and extensible semantic framework for evidence-based cultural heritage information integration. It is intended to be a common language for domain experts and implementers to formulate requirements for information systems and to serve as a guide for good practice of conceptual modelling. In this way, it can provide the "semantic glue" needed to mediate between different sources of cultural heritage information, such as that published by museums, libraries and archives.

The CIDOC CRM is the outcome of over 20 years of development and maintenance work, originally by the CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group and, presently, by the CIDOC CRM SIG, both of which are working groups of CIDOC. Since December, 2006, it has been recognized as an official ISO standard. This status was renewed in 2014 and can be found at  ISO 21127:2014.

The CIDOC CRM is a living standard that is designed in such a way as to provide both high level information retrieval and the formulation and documentation of very specific data points and questions. The CIDOC CRM thus consists of the CRMbase standard which provides the basic classes and relations devised for the cultural heritage world. This base ontology is complemented by a series of modular extensions to the basic model. Such extensions are designed to support different types of specialized research questions and documentation such as bibliographic documentation or geoinformatics. The CIDOC CRM extensions are developed in partnership with the research communities in question. These extensions are formulated in a manner that is harmonized with the base ontology such that data expressed in any extension is compatible with the base system of concepts and relations. This harmonized development process leads to a high level of information integrity and integration not available in other information systems.

CIDOC CRM is developed by the CIDOC CRM Special Interest Group. This is a volunteer community dedicated to the development and maintenance of a common standard for integrating cultural heritage data. The SIG works under the aegis of CIDOC, the International Council for Documentation, which, in turn, is a committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Membership in the CIDOC CRM SIG is on an institutional basis and its membership includes private and public institutions associated with the research and documentation of the human past. The work of the SIG is done on a volunteer basis and funding comes from the contributions in kind of the member institutions in supporting the work of their staff in contributing to this project. The SIG meets three or four times a year, the meetings being hosted by the member institutions of the SIG. As an active working group of ICOM, the SIG also participates in the annual CIDOC conference and the triannual meetings of ICOM.

Website: http://www.cidoc-crm.org/

CRMinf is a formal ontology intended to be used as a global schema for integrating metadata about argumentation and inference making in descriptive and empirical sciences such as biodiversity, geology, geography, archaeology, cultural heritage, conservation, research IT environments and research data libraries. Its primary purpose is facilitating the management, integration, mediation, interchange and access to data about reasoning by a description of the semantic relationships between the premises, conclusions and activities of reasoning.

CRMinf uses and extends the CIDOC CRM (ISO21127) as a general ontology of human activity, things and events happening in space-time. It uses the same encoding-neutral formalism of knowledge representation (“data model” in the sense of computer science) as the CIDOC CRM, which can be implemented in RDFS, OWL, on RDBMS and in other forms of encoding. Since the model reuses, wherever appropriate, parts of CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, we provide in this document also a comprehensive list of all constructs used from ISO21127, together with their definitions following the version 5.1.2 maintained by CIDOC.

Creator: International Council on Archives Expert Group on Archival Description (ICA EGAD) - Contributors (in alphabetical order of their last names): Florence Clavaud (Archives nationales de France), member of EGAD and lead of EGAD RiC-O team from 2012; Regine I. Heberlein (University of Princeton, USA), member of EGAD and EGAD RiC-O team from 2023; Miia Herrala (National Archives of Finland), member of EGAD and EGAD RiC-O team from 2016 to 2022; Jan Krause-Bilvin (Archives cantonales vaudoises, Switzerland), member of EGAD and EGAD RiC-O team from 2023; Daniel Pitti (University of Virginia, USA), chair of EGAD from 2012; Aaron Rubinstein (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA), member of EGAD and EGAD RiC-O team from 2012 to 2022; Tobias Wildi (University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons, Switzerland), member of EGAD and EGAD RiC-O team from 2019; Ivo Zandhuis (Consultant Digital Cultural Heritage, The Netherlands), member of EGAD and EGAD RiC-O team from 2023. - Publisher: International Council on Archives - Rights: Copyright 2019-, International Council on Archives (ICA) - License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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.

• The Ownership Status of the Gʼpsgolox totem pole (ZE8) ascribes owner (ZP24) the Haisla people (E74). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%CA%BCpsgolox_totem_pole)
• The Classificatory Status of the "French baguette" (ZE4) ascribes classification (ZP12) Intangible Cultural Heritage (E55). (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63800674)

Ontology for a semantic electronic encyclopedia on local cultural heritage and history

epotec is an ontology projet gathering standards ontologies for material cultural heritage:

- CIDOC-CRM for the event and the objets

- RDAA for the agents

- RICO for the archives description

- and so on.

 

paintings from the Iveagh Bequest (E18) has current owner «English Heritage» (E40)

This model aims to cover the field of conservation and restoration of cultural objects, including the analysis and studies of the cultural objects, such as art works or historical monuments. It provides concepts as they are handled by the domain's professionals: cultural objects, interventions on the ground, artworks' analysis, scientific instrumentation, alteration, materials etc. 

This ontology is destined especially to museums and cultural institutions, in order to facilitate the protection and curation of Cultural Heritage (CH). These institutions share some common grounds and their actors need to gather and exchange knowledge about diagnosis' method, analysis results, treatments, preventive measures etc. 

This model uses CIDOC CRM (7.x.x) as a general ontology of human activity, things and events happening in space and time. It uses also CRMsci v.1.6, the "Scientific Observation Model" which is an extension of CIDOC CRM to integrate metadata for scientific observation, measurements and processed data in descriptive and empirical sciences. 

The CRM cr v.1 extension was carried out in the PARCOURS Project and re-shaped in a v.2 in the REPERAGE Project.

 

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.

This property associates an instance of CP33 Conservation project activity with an instance of CP27 Architecture Analysis Output that act as a guideline for the conservation project. Conservation project (CP33) is elaborated moving from the attribute assignments carried out as outputs (CP27) during the architecture analysis which is compulsory to intervene on cultural heritage architecture. A use case of this property is to describe what elements, retrieved from the architecture analysis, have oriented the conservation project.

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.

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

Published by Francesco Beretta (CNRS/Université de Lyon), 7 December 2020. Last revised on 8 August 2023. (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Publications about this project

 

 

The extension of CIDOC CRM for semantic data for humanities and social sciences (SDHSS) stems from the need to conceptualise the reality in the world, and more specifically factual information, from the point of view of historical research. The ontological commitment is therefore related to the domain of discourse of history but insofar as history, as a discipline that studies the life of humans and societies in the past, is interested in all the different aspects of social, economic, political, religious, literary and cultural life, the scope of this extension could be defined as the whole of social and human life, apprehended from the descriptive point of view, and global approach to reality, that characterises historical research and, more generally, humanities and social sciences.

 

This definition of the scope or domain modelled is based on the conviction that in a constructivist approach of scientific knowledge, a conceptualisation and data model can only be developed from the point of view of a specific discipline because scientific objects do not exist in the absolute but depend on the method and research agenda. They depend on the perspective or epistemic context researchers adopt in considering states of affairs: scientific objects, and semantic models modelling them, are not declared to be the only appropriate and exclusive representation of things in the pre-Kantian sense but defined as intentional objects constructed from the point of view of a discipline and methodological approach in relation to things in the world. Scientific objects are not the things in the world themselves, even if they must necessarily refer to them by way of observation or experimentation, if a scientific and therefore realistic approach is to be maintained. This corresponds to the notion of inter-objectivity in social sciences relying on the distinction between things in themselves and things as perceived, experienced and discussed by human subjects, in their shared intentionality and in relation to their social practices and context.

 

The SDHSS namespace is split into a top-level one (the present one) and different namespaces (each belonging to a subproject of the main one) in order to provide a more flexible development of the model, and to allow the management of sub-domains of historical research, and eventually of other disciplines, by experts belonging to different research communities. In these namespaces, new classes and properties allow to clarify the modelling of the reality studied from the point of view of historical research intended in the general perspective outlined above.

 

Inspiring previous work and literature, in addition to the modelling experience developed in the symogih.org project during more than 10 years and the robust object-oriented approach developed by the CIDOC CRM SIG, is the one accomplished in the Wonderweb European project which produced the DOLCE and DnS foundational ontologies. The general epistemological approach is inspired by the work of Evandro Agazzi about realist objectivity, distinguishing between things and scientific objects, and more or less recent developments in social sciences (sociology and social psychology) especially with regard to the fundamental notion of social representations and collective intentionality. These are the epistemological foundations of the top-level ontology proposed for factual information modelling as an integration of CIDOC CRM trying to comply as much as possible with its modelling principles and to harmonise with the existing classes and properties.

 

Finally, this epistemological approach proposes a fundamental distinction —essential in historical and social sciences research— between the collective intentionality of the society under study and the one of the research community, distinction expressed by the term of “historical (epistemic) distance”. Modelled classes and properties can be considered as expressions of the conceptualization of the researchers, in relation to their general research agenda and line of inquiry, and the general conceptualization of their domain of discourse, whereas their instances, and the intentional content of them, should reproduce the social representations of the studied society. E.g. the intentional meaning of a relationship of type ‘marriage’ should be defined according to the social representations of the society of the past. This representation, a ‘description’ in the sense of the DnS ontology, allowed the considered society to see in a specific set of states of affairs a ‘social situation’ satisfying the given description, i.e. a marriage. The understanding of marriage in the present perspective of the researcher, in relation to his or hers own social life, should not be considered in the definition of the type 'marriage', as an instance of the class crm:E55 Type. In historical research, one should as far as possible avoid projecting one's own representations on the events of the past in order to avoid anachronisms and ideological reconstructions of historical factuality. This modelling approach, splitting the definition of the classes (the present) and the one of their instances (the past), allows to give full consideration to historical distance as a means of carefully distinguishing between the different levels of human representations, the past and the present ones.

 

 

Sources

Agazzi E., Scientific objectivity and its contexts (Cham: Springer, 2014).

Agazzi E. (ed.), Varieties of scientific realism : objectivity and truth in science (Cham: Springer, 2017).

Beretta F., « A Challenge for Historical Research: Making Data FAIR Using a Collaborative Ontology Management Environment (OntoME) », Semantic Web 12, n^o 2 (1 janvier 2021): 279‑94, https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-200416.

Beretta F., « Interopérabilité des données de la recherche et ontologies fondationnelles : un éco-système d’extensions du CIDOC CRM pour les sciences humaines et sociales », in Lasolle N. et al. (eds), Actes des journées humanités numériques et Web sémantique (Nancy, France): 2-22. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7014341

Doerr M., « The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Module: An Ontological Approach to Semantic Interoperability of Metadata », AI Magazine 24, n^o 3 (15 septembre 2003): 75‑75, https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v24i3.1720.

Doerr M., Hunter J. and Lagoze C., « Towards a Core Ontology for Information Integration. », Journal of Digital Information 4, n^o 1 (2003), http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/92.

Doerr M., « Ontologies for Cultural Heritage », in Staab St. (éd.), Handbook on ontologies, 2nd ed., Berlin, Springer, 2009, 2009, 463‑86.

Gangemi A. et al.,« From collective intentionality to intentional collectives: An ontological perspective. », Cogn. Syst. Res. 7, no 2‑3 (2006): 192‑208, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2005.11.009.

Gangemi A., Lehmann J., Catenacci C., « Norms and plans as unification criteria for social collectives. », Auton. Agents Multi Agent Syst. 17, no 1 (2008): 70‑112, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-008-9038-9.

Mika P., Gangemi A., « Descriptions of social relations », in Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the Semantic Web (Galway, 2004), https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/events/foaf-galway/papers/fp/descriptions_of_social_relations/.

Masolo C., Borgo S., Gangemi A., Guarino N., Oltramari A., WonderWeb Deliverable D18 Ontology Library (final). (Trento, Laboratory For Applied Ontology , 2003).

Masolo C. et al., « Social Roles and their Descriptions. », in Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference (KR2004), Whistler, Canada, June 2-5, 2004, 2004, 267‑77, http://www.aaai.org/Library/KR/2004/kr04-029.php.

Searle J., Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2010).
Thomas T. (ed.), Encyclopedia of critical psychology (New York: Springer Reference, 2014) (especially entries: Interobjectivity; Social Constructionism; Social Representations; Socialization).

 

See also:

• Semantic Data for Humanities Project
• Geovistory VRE (based on SDHSS)

A namespace for the data model used for documenting the cultural heritage assets in the repository created for the Voeska project.

The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) is a theoretical and practical tool for information integration in the field of cultural heritage. It can help researchers, administrators and the public explore complex questions with regards to our past across diverse and dispersed datasets. The CIDOC CRM achieves this by providing definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation and of general interest for the querying and exploration of such data. Such models are also known as formal ontologies. These formal descriptions allow the integration of data from multiple sources in a software and schema agnostic fashion.

This namespace is the top level namespace for the CIDOC CRM ontology. It has no class or property instances but subsumes all versions of the CRM.

"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.

• The classificatory status of the assemblage of apatosaurus and camarasaurus remains (ZE4) ascribes classification Brontosaurus excelsus (E55)
• The classificatory status of the "French baguette" (ZE4) ascribes classification Intangible Cultural Heritage (E55)
   

"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.

This class comprises physical objects (printed books, scores, CDs, DVDs, CD-ROMS, etc.) that were produced by (P186i) an industrial process involving a given instance of F3 Manifestation. As a result, all the instances of F5 Item associated with a given instance of F3 Manifestation are expected to carry the content defined in that instance of F3 Manifestation, although some or even all of them may happen to carry a content that significantly differs from it, due to either an accident in the course of industrial production, or subsequent physical modification or degradation.

An instance of F5 Item that consists of a physical object or set of objects with clear physical boundaries is also an instance of E22 Human-Made Object. An instance of F5 Item that is stored on a part of a larger physical support (such as an electronic file among others on a disc) can also be considered to be an instance of E25 Human-Made Feature.

The notion of F5 Item is only relevant with regard to the production process, from a bibliographic point of view. The physical units managed by cultural heritage institutions in their holdings are a distinct notion: a unit of holdings certainly can be equal to an instance of F5 Item, but it also can be either “bigger” than one (e.g., when two instances of F5 Item are bound together (in the case of printed books)), or “smaller” than one (e.g., for incomplete holdings, such as when only one CD from a two-CD set is held). From an operational point of view, cultural heritage institutions typically do not manage instances of F5 Item, but physical holdings units, instances of E19 Physical Object, although for libraries in most cases this is not significant because each item corresponds with a single unit. When this is not the case, the linkage between items and the units relevant for collection management can be recorded through the P46 is composed of (forms part of) property between instances of F5 Item and instances of E19 Physical Object. If needed, an instance of E19 Physical Object can be typed as a unit through the P2 has type (is type of) property.

the area covered by the World Heritage Site of Stonehenge (E53) falls within the area of Salisbury Plain (E53)

• The Ownership Status of the Gʼpsgolox totem pole (ZE8) ascribes owner (ZP24) the Haisla people (E74). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%CA%BCpsgolox_totem_pole)
• The Classificatory Status of the "French baguette" (ZE4) ascribes classification (ZP12) Intangible Cultural Heritage (E55). (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63800674)

  Piazza Navona (Cp18 Space entity) is regulated by the Piano Regolatore Generale di Roma as part of the historic centre of Rome.

  The historic centre of Trinidad Cp18 Space entity in Cuba is regulated by the management plan required by the inscription in the World Heritage List.

The Venus by Praxiteles; any non-digital cultural heritage object; the House of Parliament

paintings from the Iveagh Bequest (E18) has current owner «English Heritage» (E40)

The area covered by the World Heritage Site of Stonehenge (E53) falls within the area of Salisbury Plain (E53). (Pryor, 2016)

This class comprises phenomena of formally defined and socially respected bindings between different instances of E39 Actors or between multiple actors and instances of E70 Thing. Instances of SOxxx Formal Social Binding come into being and end with an explicit act of declaration or indirectly through other publicly acknowledged events, such as via heritage at birth or death. Depending on their type, they are associated with characteristic rights and obligations, which are subject to the formal legal system of the respecting society, regardless whether this is based on written laws or oral tradition.

Formal Social Bindings are not observable as such, even though the behavior of involved actors may suggest their existence, such as being married. They are exclusively a consequence of the establishing event, which should be kept as social memory in a persistent documented form or as oral tradition, and the continued respect of this kind of binding by a target community. For instance, a community may declare a certain kind of marriage as invalid from some date on, and later redeclare it as valid. Their existence does not depend on the existence of social memory. Documents may be lost or involved actors may not have been aware of the respective establishing events, but later evidence of the establishing events may be found. In these cases, the society may not act according to the respective rights and obligations as long as the fact remains unknown, but is obliged to when the necessary evidence has been provided. Involved actors may have difficulties proving the existence of the binding to authorities when respective documents are lost, but that does not affect their actual existence. However, certain legal systems may require in certain kinds of cases the provision of evidence itself as part of the establishing event.

In some contexts, Formal Social Bindings are also called social institutions. Examples include memberships, employments, ownerships, rights of use, marriage, parenthood and others. In documentation practice, instances of Formal Social Bindings may by shortcut by simple binary relations, such as “is married to”.

• 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 held by the Swedish Polity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%CA%BCpsgolox_totem_pole)
• The Classifactory 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)

What is the CRMba?

The CRMba is an ontology and RDF Schema to encode metadata about the documentation of archaeological buildings (Ronzino 2015, Ronzino et al. 2015). The model was conceived to support the process of recording the evidences and the discontinuities of matter on archaeological buildings, in order to identify the evolution of the structure throughout the centuries and to record the relationships between each of the building components among them and with the building as a whole. It aims at expressing the semantic relations of the stratigraphic units of a standing building, taking into account the stratigraphic analysis theory of the standing buildings (Brogiolo 1988, Parenti 2002, Schuller 2002, Morriss 2004).

The model is built on the same principles of the CIDOC CRM.  The model reuses, when appropriate, parts of the CIDOC CRM classes and properties, and refers to other CRM extensions that were developed to ensure the completeness of documentation. In particular, the CRMba model incorporates parts of the CRMgeo, a detailed model of generic spatio-temporal topology and geometric description (Doerr & Hiebel 2013); parts of CRMsci, a model for scientific observation, measurements and processed data in descriptive and empirical sciences (such as biology, geology, geography, cultural heritage conservation, etc.) and CRMarchaeo, a model developed for the documentation of archaeological excavations.

The CRMba is a proposal for approval by CIDOC CRM  SIG

 

 What is the idea?

The goal of the CRMba conceptual model is to provide support to:

• understand the building structure and its development;
• recognize the use of a building and how it evolved over the years;
• identify the various phases of the building as a result of construction, transformation, modification and reuse;
• support the investigation and interpretation of the material evidence in the standing structures;
• understand the correlation between parts of a buildings and whole;
• recognize, analyse and interpret the stratigraphy of standing structures and of ruins;
• support the dating process through the identification of the Stratigraphic Relationship (SR) between the various Stratigraphic Units (SU), which can be inferred by the identification of the Stratigraphic Interfaces (SI).

A data model for cultural heritage institutions in Latvia

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. PE is being developed in the context of the Parthenos Project, a European funded project.

• The Ownership Status of the Gʼpsgolox totem pole (ZE8) ascribes owner (ZP24) the Haisla people (E74). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%CA%BCpsgolox_totem_pole)
• The Classificatory Status of the "French baguette" (ZE4) ascribes classification (ZP12) Intangible Cultural Heritage (E55). (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63800674)

enhancing the crm 7.1.2 with shortcut properties for convenient use and display with technical heritage objects

This class includes actions for the domain classification of heritage objects of all kinds. This action consists in classifying a heritage object in a disciplinary domain expressing the category to which this object belongs. For example: "textile" or "painting. This classification is based on the personal opinion and expertise of the classifier, who will choose to classify this object in a field.

• The classificatory status of the assemblage of apatosaurus and camarasaurus remains (ZE4) ascribes classification Brontosaurus excelsus (E55)
• The classificatory status of the "French baguette" (ZE4) ascribes classification Intangible Cultural Heritage (E55)
   

This class comprises activities through which instances of Z9 Storage Unit are produced.

Although the activity of producing a storage unit can be motivated by preservation only, it inevitably results in the creation of an expression that consists of the sum of all expressions conveyed by the individual items and/or manifestation singletons that make up the resulting storage unit. Z14 Storage Unit Creation is therefore declared as a subclass of F28 Expression Creation.

A given instance of Z14 Storage Unit Creation can involve truly artistic endeavours, such as the conception and realisation of a binding which can be regarded as a piece of cultural heritage in its own right.

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

The MetaPaintings Description project aims to create a comprehensive ontology utilizing the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM) to document and describe meta-level attributes of paintings. MetaPaintings, in this context, refer to paintings that transcend their physical form and encompass additional layers of meaning, such as cultural significance, historical context, and artistic interpretation.

The CIDOC CRM serves as the foundational framework for organizing and categorizing the diverse array of meta-information associated with paintings. By adopting CIDOC CRM's semantic structure, the ontology ensures interoperability and compatibility with other cultural heritage data systems and allows for seamless integration with existing databases and repositories.

This class comprises a temporary relationship of a socially accepted form between two business partners consisting of an obligation to make compensating provisions to each other, normally with the goal to terminate the obligation immediately or within some agreed time-span. An instance of SOxxx Business Obligation may implicitly come into being by an agreed-on initial provision of one partner, or by a formal contract. It ends with an agreement of the partners about completed compensation or the arbitration by a responsible social institution. The obligation may be accountable, i.e., quantifiable in terms of a currency, and compensation may be agreed to be defined arithmetically based on monetary values and counter-values, such as when paying for a purchase in a supermarket, but also when paying back a loan with interest rates for years. In other cases, partner may agree to define the compensation of obligations by a set of particular material provisions, or by a combination of monetary exchange and provisions without a defined monetary counter-value, as characteristically in small communities, earlier societies but also in exchanges between cultural heritage institutions. Even in a modern industrialized society, business obligations may be supported by but are not defined by mathematical accounting. Economic difficulties of partners regularly lead to agreements overriding the defined monetary counter-values. Even if the units of provisions made are well-defined, partners may not agree on the termination of the obligation and appeal to an arbiter.

Informal obligations, such as those initiated by gifts or attempts of bribery, and obligations by other social interactions that cannot be formally compensated or terminated, in whatever form of community or society, do not fall under this class and may be modelled as other forms of obligation sharing more general traits with this class.

• The classificatory status 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 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 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 classificatory status 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 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 includes instances relating to environments resulting consistent for natural and anthropic features and having a special cultural value. Sometimes this consistency is evident from a perceptive viewpoint, sometimes this consistency is perceivable as homogeneity. Such instances may possess a special cultural value and be defined as outstanding universal value in Unesco list or may have been subject to spatial and landscape constraints by national conservation agencies or zoning regulations. However, instances of CP17 Cultural Heritage Landscape Element may also simply connote a recognized locally significant urban or rural landscape.

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. PE is being developed in the context of the Parthenos Project, a European funded project.

This class comprises unique combinations of instances of E18 Physical Thing that are bound together, or otherwise physically united, for the sake of preservation, and are communicated to library users as single, indivisible units. The individual components of a given instance of Z9 Storage Unit are generally instances of F4 Manifestation Singleton and/or F5 Item, but the binding itself that holds them together can be a valuable piece of cultural heritage that is worth describing for its own sake. Z9 Storage Unit makes it possible to account indifferently for the description of the various materials (printed or manuscript or of any other type) that make up a holding, and of the binding (or any other type of device, e.g. a box, a casket, etc.) that was produced for that holding, if needed.

CRMarchaeo is an extension of CIDOC CRM created to support the archaeological excavation process and all the various entities and activities related to it. The model has been created starting from standards and models already in use by national and international cultural heritage institutions, and has evolved through deep analysis of existing metadata from real archaeological documentation. It has been enriched by continuous collaboration with various communities of archaeologists from different countries and schools. Furthermore, it takes advantage of the concepts provided by CRMsci, from which it inherits most of the geological and stratigraphic principles that govern archaeological stratigraphy, extending these principles. 

CRMarchaeo is intended to provide all necessary tools to manage and integrate existing documentation in order to formalise knowledge extracted from observations made by archaeologists, recorded in various ways and adopting different standards. In this sense, its purpose is to facilitate the semantic encoding, exchange, interoperability and access of existing archaeological documentation.

enhancing the crm 7.1.2 with shortcut properties for convenient use and display with technical heritage objects

Additional ontology for cultural heritage institutions in Latvia

enhancing the crm 7.1.2 with shortcut properties for convenient use and display with technical heritage objects

Definition

Information Resources that have at least one Web Representation and at least a URI.

Comment

This class is for the digital representations that are aggregated to the cultural heritage object. As such, it is the range of edm:hasView

• The classificatory status of the assemblage of apatosaurus and camarasaurus remains (ZE4) ascribes classification Brontosaurus excelsus (E55)
• The classificatory status of the "French baguette" (ZE4) ascribes classification Intangible Cultural Heritage (E55)
   

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

The CPM represents the semantic contents of cultural heritage conservation process and points at achieving integration, mediation and interchange of information in the midst of cultural heritage conservation discipline.

(CP19)Cultural Heritage Landscape Element is subclass of (CP17)Open Air Space

• The classificatory status 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 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)

CRMtex is an extension of CIDOC CRM created to support the study of ancient documents by identifying relevant textual entities and by modelling the scientific process related with the investigation of ancient texts and their features in order to foster integration with other cultural heritage research fields, such as archaeology and history. The concept of “written text”, introduced by the extension, is intended to identify a common entity consisting in a particular feature (i.e., set of glyphs) created (i.e., written) on various kinds of support, having semiotic significance and the declared purpose of conveying a specific message towards a given recipient or group of recipients. The modelling of the scientific autoptic examination of the document, consisting of an accurate analysis of the surface and the signs and prescribing the use of specific tools and procedures, is another key aspect taken into account by the extension.

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).

What is the CRMsci?

The Scientific Observation Model (CRMsci) is a formal ontology intended to be used as a global schema for integrating metadata about scientific observation, measurements and processed data in descriptive and empirical sciences such as biodiversity, geology, geography, archaeology, cultural heritage conservation and others in research IT environments and research data libraries. Its primary purpose is facilitating the management, integration, mediation, interchange and access to research data by description of semantic relationships, in particular causal ones. It is not primarily a model to process the data themselves in order to produce new research results, even though its representations offer themselves to be used for some kind of processing.

CRMsci uses and extends the CIDOC CRM (ISO21127) as a general ontology of human activity, things and events happening in spacetime. It uses the same encoding-neutral formalism of knowledge representation (“data model” in the sense of computer science) as the CIDOC CRM, which can be implemented in RDFS, OWL, on RDBMS and in other forms of encoding. Since the model reuses, wherever appropriate, parts of CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, we provide in this document also a comprehensive list of all constructs used from ISO21127, together with their definitions following the version 6.2  maintained by CIDOC.

What is the idea?

The CRMsci has been developed bottom up from specific metadata examples from biodiversity, geology, archeology, cultural heritage conservation and clinical studies, such as water sampling in aquifer systems, earthquake shock recordings, landslides, excavation processes, species occurrence and detection of new species, tissue sampling in cancer research, 3D digitization, based on communication with the domain experts and the implementation and validation in concrete applications. It takes into account relevant standards, such as INSPIRE, OBOE, national archeological standards for excavation, Digital Provenance models and others. For each application, another set of extensions is needed in order to describe those data at an adequate level of specificity, such as semantics of excavation layers or specimen capture in biology. However, the model presented here describes, together with the CIDOC CRM, a discipline neutral level of genericity, which can be used to implement effective management functions and powerful queries for related data. It aims at providing superclasses and superproperties for any application-specific extension, such that any entity referred to by a compatible extension can be reached with a more general query based on this model.

CRMsci is a proposal for approval by CIDOC CRM  SIG

https://cidoc-crm.org/crmsci/