My second CIDOC CRM workshop
Today I went to my second CIDOC CRM workshop. As before, the workshop was led by Stephen Stead, one of the people who started the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model Special Interest Group (CRM-SIG). He has been working on the CRM since 2000 and is one of the editors who helped to make the CRM an ISO standard. I learned a lot and I am ready to use it.
What I learned
So last time I attended a rather specialised workshop based on CRMarchaeo, an extension of CIDOC CRM designed to support the archaeological excavation process and all the various entities and activities involved. That was very interesting. Today we started again with CRMarchaeo and how you can use this onthology to create a data model for excavations. Stephen went very deep and showed us examples of field notes, corrections and relationships. All mapped into his data model.
The first conclusion I could draw today was that with this CRMarchaeo ontology you are able to completely document the excavation process down to each individual task. Basically, an excavation documented in this way could be used to automatically write an excavation report, including all the interpretations. This was an example of a full digital documentation.
What I asked
In addition to excavation, I was also interested in the documentation of museum objects. What I wanted was a simple documentation of a group of objects and their relationship to each other, but also a deeper description of the representations on these objects. Stephen was not familiar with these particular objects. However, he patiently explained to me how he was going to go about it.
I learned a lot and step by step we built up a database linking different objects and describing different parts of the object. We did not finish, of course, but it was a start. I will now continue to enter data to eventually build a graph model. I am looking forward to doing this as the graph model will visually show me the relationships between my objects. In the end, this might help me with my research.
What I recommend
Don’t be afraid of CIDOC-CRM. It seems hard at first and true, you need some time to get into the different entitites and connections. But when done, it is relatively easy to build up your data model. Stephen also said that the beginning is the hardest. At a later point, when all the objects have definitions, it is more or less a copy and paste task.