Folks, I recently wrote an article about the design of the data model for RLG Cultural Materials that explicitly mentions the influence of the CRM; here are a couple of excerpts:
"[In 1999] the most significant new development in the field of cultural information standards was the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, an "object-oriented domain ontology" for expressing the implicit and explicit concepts in the documentation of cultural heritage (RLG Focus 45, August 2000). The CIDOC CRM was designed to meet exactly the kind of cultural data integration challenges we faced, and it had a pivotal influence on our work." "The logical model we developed adopted two key features of the CIDOC CRM: * "The use of events as the primary mechanism to describe the various relationships between people, places, and works. Events are normally implicit within cultural documentation; for example, the Dublin Core's CREATOR element implies a creation event in which an actor created the resource being described. Making these implicit entities explicit gives the logical model almost limitless flexibility to express different kinds of relationships. * "Sub-typing" of entities via a link to an external type value, so that external term lists and hierarchical thesauri can be used to refine the semantics of individual entities. This sub-typing applies both to primary entities, such as events or works, and to linking entities, so that relationships (such as actors' roles in events) can be described in more detail. For example, our initial list of event types includes terms such as "created," "contributed," "awarded," and "transfer of title." The linking entity between events and actors has an initial set of role types that includes terms such as "dedicatee," "bestower," and "recipient." The full article, "Touring the Information Landscape: Designing the Data Model for RLG Cultural Materials," can be found at http://www.rlg.org/r-focus/i58.html#touring Cheers, T. ====================================================================== Tony Gill ArtSTOR Director of Metadata, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 140 East 62nd Street, New York, NY, 10021, USA t1 (direct): +1 (646) 274-2265, t2: +1 (212) 838-8400 w: http://www.mellon.org, f: +1 (212) 223-2778
