A CIDOC CRM workshop
This week I attended part of a two day CIDOC CRM workshop run by Stephen Stead, who is actively involved in the creation and development of this ontology. I already knew a bit about CIDOC CRM, but I also learnt a lot, especially for my own projects.
What is CIDOC CRM?
The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) is a theoretical and practical tool for information integration in the field of cultural heritage. […] 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 […] Such models are also known as formal ontologies.
https://cidoc-crm.org/
So basically it is a way of describing your data. The purpose of this, of course, is to make cultural heritage information machine-readable. How can a machine understand the sentence “Napoleon took part in the Battle of Waterloo”? It has to break everything down into entities: “Napoleon (PERSON) was participating in (ACTION IN RELATION TO) the Battle of Waterloo (EVENT)”. There are ways to do this automatically, but when we build databases we need to define these relationships manually and, most importantly, intelligently.
Introduction
The first day was all about that. Stephen explained why we need ontologies and how the CIDOC CRM came about. He explained the difference between classes and properties and how they relate to each other. It is all quite clever, if a bit complex. Relationships in the humanities can be very difficult. For example, when you describe an object, what date do you give it? The date of creation? MAybe, the date of use? The date the object was found? What if you are not sure?
This is how multi-instancing works. A Neo-Assyrian relief is a man-made object, but it also has different functions during its lifetime. It is a piece in a museum, an excavated artefact, a representation of royal power for the Assyrians and much more. CIDOC CRM tries to capture all of this in a machine-readable way. According to Stephen, the CIDOC CRM is quite small, with only 81 classes and 160 properties, which is amazing because it can be understood. Other ontologies can be so large that only machines can decipher them.
Archaeology
In archaeology we need databases. These databases do not simply list artefacts, they try to establish relationships between the data. As in the example above, I would have an entry for ‘Napoleon’ in my people table and an entry for ‘Battle of Waterloo’ in my events table. Normally we link tables in databases, but this does not describe the exact relationship between the person and the event. By using CIDOC CRM we can build a database so that this is possible.
A more practical example is the description of a scanned object. When I scan something, of course I save all the data that is created. But where do I store the information about the equipment and software I used, and what the object is really about, what it is made of? Well, this is what metadata and paradata are for: information about the object and the process by which it was collected. Again, as with the database example, I need to find a way to record everything. This is where CIDOC CRM can help, because it provides the necessary framework.
In a future post, I will try to explain this in a little more detail with a concrete example from a current project of mine, but that is for another time.
