CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model Tutorial

This tutorial introduced the audience to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, a core ontology and ISO standard (ISO 21127) for the semantic integration of cultural information with library, archive and other information. The CIDOC CRM concentrates on the definition of relationships, rather than terminology, in order to mediate between heterogeneous database schemata and metadata structures. This led to a compact model of 80 classes and 130 relationships, easy to comprehend and suitable to serve as a basis for mediation of cultural and library information and thereby provide the semantic 'glue' needed to transform today's disparate, localised information sources into a coherent and valuable global resource. It comprises the concepts characteristic for data structures employed by most museum, archive and library documentation. Its central idea is the explicit modelling of events, both for the representation of metadata, such as creation, publication, and use, as well as for content summarization and the creation of integrated knowledge bases. It is not prescriptive, but provides a framework to describe common high-level semantics that allow for information integration at the schema level for a wide area of domains.

The CIDOC CRM, as an effort of the museums community, is paralleled by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) by IFLA for the librarians community. Both Working Groups have come together since 2003 and started to develop a common harmonized model. The first draft version is now available as a compatible extension of the CRM, the ooFRBR, covering equally libraries and museums.

The tutorial aimed at rendering the necessary knowledge to understand the potential of applying the CRM — where it can be useful and what the major technical issues of an application are. It gave an overview of the concepts and relationships covered by the CRM. As an example of a simple application, it presented the CRM Core Metadata Element Set, a minimal metadata schema of about 20 elements, still compatible with the CRM, and demonstrated how even this simple schema can be used to create large networks of integrated knowledge about physical and digital objects, persons, places and events. As an example of a simple compatible extension, it also presented the core model of digitization processes used in the CASPAR project to describe digital provenance.

In part two, the tutorial presented the draft ooFRBR Model. This model describes in detail the intellectual creation process from the first conception to the publishing in industrial form such as books or electronically. This proved equally interesting for the digital libraries community, and it is a fine example of the extensibility of the CRM for dedicated domains. There was enough time for questions and discussion at the end.

Target Audience

Ontology experts, digital library designers, data warehouse designers, system integrators, portal designers that work in the wider area of cultural and library information, but also IT-Staff of libraries, museums and archives, vendors of cultural and other information systems. Basic knowledge of object-oriented data models is required.

Presenter

Martin Doerr, Information Systems Lab, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), Vassilika Vouton.

Duration

Part one: 3 hours, part two: 1.5 hours