18th CIDOC SIG meeting

Meeting Date:	14 -15 September 2008, 18 September 2008
Meeting Place:	Athens, Greece
Meeting Site:	Benaki Museum

Sunday 14 September 2008
9:30-13:00, CIDOC CRM Tutorial

This tutorial will introduce the audience to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, a core ontology and ISO standard (ISO 21127) for the semantic integration of cultural information with library, archive and other information. The CIDOC CRM concentrates on the definition of relationships, rather than terminology, in order to mediate between heterogeneous database schemata and metadata structures. This leads to a compact model of 80 classes and 130 relationships, easy to comprehend and suitable to serve as a basis for mediation of cultural and library information and thereby provide the semantic 'glue' needed to transform today's disparate, localised information sources into a coherent and valuable global resource. It comprises the concepts characteristic of data structures employed by most museum, archive and library documentation. Its central idea is the explicit modelling of events, both for the representation of metadata, such as creation, publication, and use, as well as for content summarization and the creation of integrated knowledge bases. It is not prescriptive, but provides a framework to describe common high-level semantics that allow for information integration at the schema level for a wide area of domains.

The tutorial aims at rendering the necessary knowledge to understand the potential of applying the CRM - where it can be useful and what the major technical issues of an application are. It will present an overview of the concepts and relationships covered by the CRM. As an example of a simple application, it will present the CRM Core Metadata Element Set, a minimal metadata schema of about 20 elements, still compatible with the CRM, and demonstrate how even this simple schema can be used to create large networks of integrated knowledge about physical and digital objects, persons, places and events. As an example of a simple compatible extension, it will present the core model of digitization processes used in the CASPAR project to describe digital provenance.


Working Group sessions of CIDOC CRM SIG

The CIDOC CRM became an ISO standard in 2006. Since then, the Special Interest Group has worked on amendments to the standard, following feedback and requests from the community and relevant applications. These (backwards compatible) amendments are now finalized and should be submitted to ISO as proposed update of the standard. Parallel to this, the Group has successfully collaborated with IFLA on FRBRoo, an ontology of the concepts described in FRBR and a specialization of the CIDOC CRM. Together, they cover museum and library information in great detail. By the date of the
meeting, FRBRoo is expected to become an official IFLA document. Besides that, there had been work on CRM compatible data structures and other specializations of the CRM in various groups and projects.

Sunday 14 September 2008
14:00-17:00

Following the CRM tutorial in the morning, we shall discuss with the participants what they regard as the most important part of the work to continue. We wish to elicit feed-back from the community, and invite participants to offer their active participation in the proposed activities. Areas of continuation could be:

• Museum-Archive Integration
• CRM compliant metadata formats, TEI and CRM
• Documentation guidelines for information integration,
• Extensions of the CRM for particular fields, such as Intellectual Property Rights, Digital Preservation, social relations
• Information forum for integrated museum information or other community needs proposed by participants.

Monday 15 September 2008,
15.45 – 18.00

1. Presentation, discussion and final decision on which amendments to the CRM will be proposed to ISO.
2. Discussion of whether the definition of the practical scope of the CRM needs adjustment.
3. Status report about collaboration with IFLA and overview of the final version of FRBRoo.
4. Status report about CRM-TEI collaboration.

Thursday 18 September 2008
9.30 – 11.30

1. Further elaboration of topics proposed on Sunday.
2. If representatives from the archival community can be attracted to this meeting, discussion of a joint model for museum and archive information.
3. Definition of an action plan for 2009.