Dear All,
The phrase in "Objectives of the CIDOC CRM"
"It intends to provide an optimal analysis of the intellectual structure of cultural documentation in logical terms. As such, it is not optimised to implementation-specific storage and processing aspects. Rather, it provides the means to understand the effects of such optimisations to the semantic accessibility of the respective contents"
...seems to be extremely shorthand for a very important issue.
My quick explanation to colleagues:
"This is a sort of normalization-denormalization issue. The CRM provides a semantically normalized form, for instance that each proposition can be read out of context. In order to reduce joins, one may shortcut structures into flat lists of fields. Then we loose some meaning, or the meaning in more indirectly connected, for instance :"father-mother, birthday, birthplace" misses the birth event. Representation of twins need then context specific rules. The CRM allows for formulating such rules in a common language, and hence to understand the effects of the denormalization for optimisation."
Any proposal for a more verbose form?
Best,
Martin
21/04/2010 by email
New phrasing:
"This is a sort of normalization-denormalization issue. The CRM provides a semantically normalized form, for instance that each proposition can be read out of context. In order to reduce joins, one may shortcut structures into flat lists of fields. Then we loose some meaning, or the meaning in more indirectly connected, for instance :"father-mother, birthday, birthplace" misses the birth event. Representation of twins need then context specific rules. The CRM allows for formulating such rules in a common language, and hence to understand the effects of the denormalization for optimisation."
Nuremberg December 2010
It intends to provide a model of the intellectual structure of cultural documentation in logical terms. As such, it is not optimised for implementation-specific storage and processing aspects. Implementations may lead to solutions where elements and links between relevant elements of our conceptualizations are no longer explicit in a database or other structured storage system. For instance the birth event that connects elements such as father, mother, birth date, birth place may not appear in the database, in order to save storage space or response time of the system. The CRM allows us to explain how such apparently disparate entities are intellectually interconnected, and how the ability of the database to answer certain intellectual questions is affected by the omission of such elements and links.
Crete May 2011
Accepted by CRM SIG meeting in Amsterdam on 17-11-2011