In message
<[email protected]>, Ryan Shaw
<[email protected]> writes
We discuss the CIDOC CRM extensively in our tech report, which I will
post a link to here as soon as it is available. I personally am of the
opinion that it is overengineered for Linked Data purposes. But I am
willing to be convinced otherwise. In any case, though the CIDOC spec
discusses historical events, I have been unable to find any examples
of people actually using it to model historical events (a recent post
to the CRM-SIG mailing list asking for examples turned up nothing).
I have been thinking about how the CRM might be used to express museum
catalogue records as Linked Data, but haven't yet reached a firm
conclusion. There is a tension between the "metadata" approach you get
in Dbpedia and the CRM approach. In Dbpedia, most of the assertions have
the resource in question as their subject, so you end up with a set of
independent assertions. Conversely, the natural result of applying CRM
modelling is that you end up with a rich and complex structure which
isn't at all amenable to SPARQL-style querying.
My current view is that it is worth throwing events into the mix, since
that lets you express co-contextual assertions ("this object was used by
William Wordsworth, at Goslar, in 1799") which would otherwise have to
be independent ("this object was used by Wordsworth", "this object was
used in Goslar", "this object was used in 1799"). However, for Linked
Data purposes you probably get diminishing returns if the assertion
structure becomes more complex than this.
It certainly ought to be the museum community which eats its own dogfood
in this regard, and I'll let the list know of any examples which I get
to hear about (or produce!).
Richard
--
Richard Light
