keep or deprecate P54 and P48?

Posted by Robert Sanderson on 03/03/2021

Dear all,

Thanks to Eleni for sending out the agenda and thereby reminding of our homework!

The proposal is to deprecate two properties, P48 has preferred identifier and P54 has current permanent location, following on from the conclusion of the discussion around the proposed property of 'has current permanent custodian' in issue 473.

As I recall it, the rationale for not adding 'has current permanent custodian' was not that the property did not make sense (it did) and not that it was not useful (it is), but that it was not necessary to add, as it is possible to add a classification to the activity that has the result of the transfer of custody, as to whether it is temporary or permanent.

The consequence of this was a (brief) examination of the specification for other properties where this pattern would be applicable, with the obvious deprecation candidates of P48 and P54.

The remediation pattern for P48 would be to add P2_has_type to the E41 Identifier to indicate preferred-ness, or the E13 attribute assignment / E15 Identifier Assignment of the identfier to the identified entity.

The remediation pattern for P54 would be to add a P2_has_type to the E9 Move to the location, in the same way that the resolution for 473 was to add P2_has_type to the Transfer of Custody.

The proposal should be considered separable -- not accepting the deprecation of P48 is not grounds for not accepting the deprecation of P54.

Posted by Dominic Oldman on 8/03/2021

Hi All, 

This may well be the right approach, but I had a general point about these areas. 

It would be useful to know the rationale behind them in the first instance. It occurred to me that perhaps the CIDOC-CRM needs to have some kind of associated knowledge base around it that points to the empirical work or evidence that led to the property in the first place so that we understand the origins of something. This is particular important as time goes by and different people join. So, it could be that items were, in hindsight, a mistake - that they are just vocabulary not ontology and not justified by practice, that they are borderline and there is a case for rationalisation, or that there has been a change of approach to these items.

It may be that we have some provenance here and I just need to look through the SIG forum etc. But I wonder whether this should be more formalised. This would strengthen the CIDOC CRM and provide more trust - but in any event the CIDOC CRM is not a top down ontology - it is a researched ontology and as an object of research it should be able to point to its underlying research, which is how the CRM should then be subsequently used - ontological commitments based on evidence.

In the 49th joint meeting of the CIDOC CRM SIG and SO/TC46/SC4/WG9; 42nd FRBR – CIDOC CRM Harmonization meeting, the sig reviewed arguments in favor and against the deprecation of P54 and P48.  

Decision: Both P54 and P48 will be kept in the model for CIDOC CRM v7.1.1. The decisions were reached independently for each property. The issue will be kept open and the scope note of P48 needs to be reworked (for v7.2) to take into consideration LRM identifiers used as a kind of Nomen/Nomen Use Statements and their status in a system that yield provenanced statements. The details of the discussion may be found here.

HW: RS and PR to provide evidence on preferred identifiers and who has the authority to declare an identifier the preferred one. If nothing of the sort can be found, maybe see if we can draw on LRMoo to express this. 

March, 2021

Rob Sanderson notes (8 June 2021): 

#519 - I think we exhausted time, energy and options in the last SIG on this one. Not sure what evidence we were looking for that would make a difference?

Rob