Post by George Bruseker (5 September 2024)
Dear all,
I am proposing this issue after discussions with many members of the SIG as an initiative to broaden the outreach of the SIG in relation to the community adopting the standard.
In brief, the proposal is to list CRM compatible extensions that are not developed by the SIG on a new section of the website. The aim of so doing would be to provide a consolidated place for finding the rich body of work of many projects and teams working to extend the CRM to apply to different application areas. It would provide a place on the official site of the SIG where this valuable work can be seen / found and reused in line with the basic principles of FAIR data and the long term open source tradition of the CRM SIG.
In order to do this, however, we should of course look to make sure that the high quality of CRM extensions is maintained.
Therefore, we need a document to define what is a CIDOC CRM compatible model, in what sense it is so and what formally must be done to list an extension to the CIDOC CRM on the website.
The document linked below, therefore, provides a description of a new, three level description of CRM compatible models
CRM base
CRM harmonized extensions (e.g.: LRMoo, CRMsci etc.)
CRM compatible extensions
After defining what these various levels mean it then proposes the criteria by which a new extension of either harmonized or compatible level can be initiated and what is required in order for it to be listed on the CRM SIG website.
The thoughts and perspectives of the community on this opening up to listing externally maintained CRM compatible extensions are welcome. We aim to fully discuss and flesh out whether this is a good idea at the upcoming SIG.
Please find the document with the initial definition of this proposal here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_mY2aQUFDQq5KZEnx15eTpM-6q8lJJnr/ed…;
Sincerely,
George
Vice-Chair CRM SIG
In the 59th joint meeting of the CIDOC CRM and ISO/TC46/SC4/WG9 & 52nd FRBR/LRMoo SIG, participants reviewed the proposal by George and Martin concerning the adoption of a three-tier system to maintaining the CIDOC CRM and extensions.
- George's slide deck can be found here.
- The document it references can be found here.
- For the details of the discussion see here.
Decision:
The SIG voted to streamline the document describing how to maintain CRM compatible extensions. Among the things that will be considered before the document gets resubmitted to the SIG, is the terms used for the two types of compatible extensions, the metadata that should be provided for an extension that is not maintained by the SIG to be referenced on the site.
HW assigned to: GB, MD, SH, DO, PM, MP, CEO, PR
Plovdiv, September 2024
Post by George Bruseker (30 March 2025)
Dear all,
I am pleased to share with you a working document to support our very first topic of the upcoming SIG, issue 682:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-ouS9vZDTwSzxSKaQKoWZ4Qo6tPbJ-buNRg…
This document will lead you to several other documents which are themselves subject of discussion and potential approval.
Here is the record of the issue from the site:
https://cidoc-crm.org/Issue/ID-682-list-externally-maintained-crm-compa…
This issue was discussed at the previous SIG and received a warm reception with, at the same time, the SIG asking for various clarifications and additional work to be done.
I want to thank all the members of the team that joined in the vigorous conversations and discussions shaping and refining the proposal and building up the various necessary supporting documents and procedures, especially Martin for putting a big effort into redacting the texts and clarifying the intended role of extensions as part of the overall plan and method of the CRM ontology.
I think we have arrived in a good place after several constructive reviews and have a series of decidable sub issues that will allow us to move this important initiative forward.
Look forward to seeing you in Bern!
Best,
George
In the 60th joint meeting of the CIDOC CRM and ISO/TC46/SC4/WG9 & 53rd FRBR/LRMoo SIG, participants reviewed the proposal by George and Martin concerning the adoption of a three-tier system to maintaining the CIDOC CRM and extensions.
- A summary of the decisions can be found below:
The SIG approved the proposal to list compatible ontologies on a designated subsite (under Resources). Declared dependencies with CRMbase and/or family models should reference the relevant version they extend.
The SIG approved the terminology to be applied to the different kinds of models –namely: (i) CIDOC CRM, (ii) CRM compatible ontologies that are also compatible with respect to one another and are maintained by the SIG, (iii) CRM compatible ontologies maintained by third parties. The terms to be used are: CIDOC CRM Ontology, CIDOC CRM Harmonized Ontology, and CIDOC CRM Compatible Ontology, respectively.
The SIG approved the definitions proposed for CIDOC CRM Harmonized Ontology and CIDOC CRM Compatible Ontology.
The SIG approved the metadata that maintainers of CIDOC CRM Compatible Ontologies need to provide to the SIG, for their ontologies to appear on the site. (Discuss the status of the Risk Conservation Ontology (MA, DF).)
The SIG approved the Criteria to be met by candidate ontologies before they get listed as “CRM Compatible Ontologies”.
The SIG approved the course of action that candidate ontology maintainers and the SIG need to take for the candidate ontology to be admitted as an extension of CIDOC CRM in the CRM Compatible Ontologies subsite. - N.b.: The Criteria and Course will be put to the test multiple times. The text as is now is agreed in principle, but will need some more refining.
- HW: GB to coordinate.
For the details of the HW and points made in the discussion, please consult the attached file.
Bern, April 2025
Post by George Bruseker (2 October 2025)
Dear all,
In the run up to the CRM SIG meeting later this month, I am passing on this HW.
This HW is basically to align the decisions to proceed with the proposal on listing compatible ontologies on the website and coming up with a practical proposal on how to integrate this into the information on the website. Here is the proposal:
Following the decision of the SIG, we will list compatible ontologies, clearly marked as NOT made by the SIG and NOT harmonized ontologies but useful compatible efforts. For the reasons and rationales etc. consult the history of the issue.
What needs doing is to decide how and where to list this info on the website in order to be clear what these are and what they are not.
Therefore, I propose we should have a 'harmonized ontologies' and 'compatible ontologies' section.
The existing 'compatible models' section which has the official CRM harmonized ontologies listed would be renamed to Harmonized Ontologies. Other than that, no change to this section.
The new section would have the name 'Compatible Ontologies'. There we need at least two pages. The first page explains what a compatible ontology is. The second one has the list of compatible ontologies.
For the first page, with the explanation of what compatible ontologies are and how to become one, we already have the text we produced so we can just use that as the website text.
For the second page, regarding displaying the compatible ontologies I would suggest that we have a standard list view / item view approach. So we would have a list view that would show in a table all compatible ontologies and their top level information. And then when you click on a particular ontology, you go to an item view. The item view will display the rest of the metadata for that entry. Please note that this differs significantly from the 'harmonized ontologies section. When you click on the compatible ontology you do not go to a new website maintained by the SIG. You just go to an item view with more metadata and links to the ontology providers pages. We don't want or need to maintain a whole website for them, these are not our ontologies just a reference list of compatible ontologies. When you click on the item view you would see the rest of the information we have stored about this ontology.
With regards to which of the main menus this goes in, I think this needs to be aligned with the overall website organization homework.
This is the metadata document that we already agreed:
On the second tab, I transposed that into a table view. I marked things in yellow which might be nice to display in the list view (to see at a glance) and in orange what would be additional info that probably is better to see in the item view.
Also as I work on other homework, I am wondering if we should enter a registration date for the information and set an automatic checkin of some number of years to see if the info is still valid. This comes to me from looking at other data on the site which is very out of date, which is hard to get on top of.
There is a subissue to this issue of how to handled ontologies that are no longer maintained.
- Quoth Eleni
"I'm alright with what you're proposing. I'm only unclear with how to treat PRESSoo and CRMba. They are by default harmonized with 5.0.4, but they are no longer harmonized. We said we would link harmonized models to the CIDOC and model versions. But I don't know what this means in terms of listing them." - Quoth Pavlos
- "I think the proposal is good. Imo, it is important NOT to confuse the categories (ontologies maintained by us vs. ontologies maintained by others).
Regarding PRESSoo and CRMba: they both have stable versions aligned with some stable version of the base model. So, I would consider them harmonized even if there is no WG working on them. No?"
I think we could keep discussing this in person at the next SIG?
Maybe it needs its own issue or a particular decision from the involved parties.
Best,
George
Post by Dominic Oldmann (3 October 2025)
Hi George
Thanks for this.
The document that was homework for Martin and I on the new framework has been delayed (although nearly complete) and is now not on the agenda for the next meeting.
I think there are different ways to approach the administration of this and it would be good to talk about this as a group. But I think that people need to see the final draft proposal first, which I hope will be available soon.
Cheers,
Dominic
Post by George Bruseker (7 October 2025)
Dear Dominic,
Thanks for this. As I was working on preparing this issue, I reread the minutes and the issue documentation since I had been assigned the coordination of the various HWs. I didn't find any assignments for you or Martin listed there (https://cidoc-crm.org/Issue/ID-682-list-externally-maintained-crm-compatible-extensions-on-new-section-of-crm-site) or I definitely would have reached out to ask about it.
Nevertheless, good to hear you have been working on something.
Since the text and approach were already agreed by a vote at the SIG, I guess you are doing the mentioned 'tweaking' of the criteria doc?
Would you like to share what you have in a google doc or equivalent with everyone else and we can deal with it with the rest of the issue next week?
I will try to attach a word doc that has the agreed text voted on by the SIG as a recall for everyone.
Best,
George