On Jul 30, 2009, at 8:17 AM, Ryan Shaw wrote:
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 10:48 PM, Richard
Light<[email protected]> wrote:
Another ontology/vocabulary which is centred around events is the
CIDOC CRM
(Conceptual Reference Model). [1] It is "a formal ontology
intended to
facilitate the integration, mediation and interchange of
heterogeneous
cultural heritage information", and comes out of the museums
community.
There is an OWL representation [2] which has been developed by a
group at
Erlangen-Nuremburg University. It certainly doesn't lack
definitions ;-)
I would be interested to hear what Linked Data folks make of it as a
potential framework for expressing more general event-related
assertions,
i.e. going beyond its stated scope. I would also value a more expert
opinion than my own as to whether the current expression of the CRM
(either
the OWL or RDF [3] version) is "fit for purpose" as a Linked Data
ontology.
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 think that might have been my post. I received some private replies
telling of CRM-based RDF being used at some museums, but unlikely to
ever be made open to the public.
There's much to like about CRM -- not the least of which is the active
and helpful community -- but I've concluded that it's overly
normalized for what I'm trying to do, which is to link data about
ancient inscriptions to data about places of the classical world.
Inscriptions are found or observed at places, but in the CRM this
relationship is always mediated by an event: an inscription is
discovered during a "finding event", which occurred at some place. We
are not ready to mint resources for all these events, most of which
will never be reused, and so we're bypassing and using non-CRM
properties to relate inscriptions and places.
--
Sean Gillies
Software Engineer
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
New York University
