CIDOC CRM
CIDOC CRM stands for the Comité International pour la Documentation Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM). CIDOC “provides the museum community with advice on good practice and developments in museum documentation” [1]. In order to become a member of CIDOC, one needs to be a member of ICOM, the international council of museums. Membership of ICOM is generally reserved for anyone with a professional tie to the museum field. ICOM is intended to provide a network for museum professionals to communicate with the public and each other, and to function as a forum for establishing ethical and professional standards for the museum field (ICOM) [2]. CIDOC forms a committee within ICOM, and the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model Special Interest Group within CIDOC has been overseeing development of CIDOC CRM. In 2006 CIDOC CRM became the official standard for the ontologies in museum curation as ISO 21127:2006 [3]. Work continues on the Model, the current standard being ISO 21127:2014.
CIDOC CRM lends itself well for scientific investigation in archaeological sciences. Typically, archaeology has suffered from fragmented datasets and terminology systems. Effective cross-searching is often limited or impossible due to differing semantics between datasets, assuming they are made available at all [Binding2010]. Some ontological instruments have been employed over time, such as the Dublin Core Metadata Elements and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). However, often times two closely related items may not find correlation via their metadata, even when adhering to Dublin Core standards. Doerr notes that metadata generally contains information pertaining to the object itself, and not to events or broader contexts to which the item may relate; two items closely tied to the same event may thus not be recognised as being related to each other, such as a copy of the Yalta Agreement and a photo taken of the allied leaders during the Yalta meeting [Doerr2003]. In his seminal work on CIDOC CRM, Doerr goes into great detail over the problems CIDOC CRM is intended to alleviate. Cherny advocates the use of CIDOC CRM over other tools like Dublin Core and SKOS, as these alternatives are not intended to represent the full richness of cultural heritage data [Cherny2015]. CIDOC CRM supports additional semantic meaning beyond what was already recorded with the original data, the lack of which would result in the previously described problem of limited relatability of items. As Cherny also mentions, CIDOC CRM has already found widespread global appeal, meaning that data integration is easier for anyone that also uses this standard. An extended example of this is noted by Dijkshoorn in the form of the Europeana Data Model, which is used to deliver cultural heritage data to the data aggregator Europeana, to which CIDOC CRM (among other alternatives) can be mapped [Dijkshoorn2018]. The Europeana Data Model is nowadays used by other aggregators, as well as institutions publishing their own data.
Binding, Ceri, “Implementing Archaeological Time Periods Using CIDOC CRM and SKOS”, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010), pp. 273–287.
Cherny, Eugene, Haase, Peter, Mouromtsev, Dmitry, Andreev, Alexey, and Pavlov, Dmitry, “Application of CIDOC-CRM for the Russian Heritage Cloud Platform”, in New Trends in Databases and Information Systems (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015), pp. 448–457.
Dijkshoorn, Chris, Aroyo, Lora, and van Ossenbruggen, Jacco, Schreiber Guus, “Modeling cultural heritage data for online publication”, Applied Ontology 13, 4 (2018), pp. 255–271.
Doerr, Martin, “The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Module: An Ontological Approach to Semantic Interoperability of Metadata”, AI Magazin 24, 3 (2003), pp. 75–92.