Post by Robert Nasarek
(15 Oct 2021)
Dear all,
My name is Robert Nasarek and as an employee of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum
I am part of the consortium NFDI4Culture inside the German National Research
Data Infrastructure. Out of this context, a few questions or needs arose that
may be answered by the SIG community:
1) CIDOC CRM needs a technical implementation (like the Erlangen-CRM<http://erlangen-crm.org/> in OWL) for computer aided processing, do you use other implementations (XML etc.)?
2) There is a need for a comparative overview of all relevant (de-facto) standards in the cultural sector with advantages and disadvantages, peculiarities, weaknesses, and strengths. Which standards are relevant and why?
3) Also, an overview of standards-based software would be useful (WissKI, Omeka S, ResearchSpace, WikiMedia...), also with advantages and disadvantages etc. Which software do you use and why?
Maybe some of you can help me answer these questions and feel like having a short meeting to discuss these things?
Just drop me a line and depending on the response, I'll organize a suitable format (the results will be shared). I would be very pleased!
With kind regards
Robert Nasarek
Post by Martin Doerr (16 October 2021)
Dear Robert,
This are good points. I believe such overview information should appear on the CRM site, however, someone needs to maintain and update.
WRT technical implementation, per default CRM-SIG provides RDFS. OWL is more powerful, but implementers must be careful not to impose constraints that come in conflict with more rare exceptions and the need to accommodate mutually contradictory alternatives of historical facts.
The idea is further that even Relation databases can implement an effective management of CRM instances, if data entry control software checks consistent use of entity types and relation types, which represent classes and properties. In the past, we have seen such implementations.
Some implementations may implement only small parts of the CRM.
LIDO is regarded to be an XML implementation with a loss-free mapping to the CRM in RDFS or OWL, and as such compatible, and promoted by CIDOC. I think there are enough systems around of this kind. Of course, they cannot be queried by superproperties, possibly some properties and classes are parametrized as types, which creates the needs again to control consistency between both.
We at FORTH have implemented such systems in XML.
About who uses what, and what is the S/W, I think we need a questionnaire.
About relevant standards, I think we need a questionnaire.
Both I think is part of this issue. Relevance needs to be defined: content size? subject coverage? expressive power?. Also, archives and libraries keep cultural materials and use their standards in quite different ways.
In 2009, I wrote a chapter for the Ontology Handbook https://dblp.org/db/series/ihis/hoo2009.html
Best,
Martin
NOTE by the CRM editors.
The issue calls for a comparative overview of all relevant (de-facto) standards in the cultural sector with advantages and disadvantages, peculiarities, weaknesses, and strengths, in order to provide an answer to the question which standards are relevant and why/to what end?
This is not just an issue for the CRM development, but more of the topic of a scientific treatise. For the moment, there hasn't been an expressed interest in pursuing this topic by any member of the SIG. In that sense, it is best to close the issue.
March 2023