Re: RDF and CIDOC CRM

Dominic,

The work done on the CIDOC CRM ontology is very impressive and it served as
a basis for my masters thesis, which focused on converting VRA 4.0 into an
RDF ontology.  My approach to the issue of developing a rich RDF ontology
for cultural heritage items differed slightly in that I focused on using
existing vocabularies (primarily schema.org and FOAF) whenever possible and
only use custom classes/properties where extra granularity was needed.  To
that extent, I also tried to nest custom classes/properties under existing
schema.org/foaf classes or properties.  My thinking focused primarily on
increasing search engine optimization while still retaining the granularity
that is found in detailed ___domain specific data models such as CIDOC CRM or
VRA.  In my opinion I did not think that "reinventing the wheel" for
properties such as name or title was necessary and I additionally I wanted
the foundation of the model to be based on ontologies that the major search
engines consume.  Below is a link to my website, where you can feel free to
download the ontology I created, the stylesheet that was used to map the
sample data as well as the thesis paper.

http://purl.org/jmixter/thesis/  <http://purl.org/jmixter/thesis/>

If you have any comments please feel free to email.  I know that the VRA
community is strongly considering developing a new version of their data
model that can be published as Linked Data and I would like to speak with
you more about strategies to do so as well as ways to leverage museum data
that is published as RDF.

Thanks,

Jeff Mixter
440-773-9079


On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 3:39 PM, Dominic Oldman <doint@oldman.me.uk> wrote:

> In response to today's conversations I would like to celebrate the virtues
> of RDF, particularly when used with a well engineered ontology.
>
> The ResearchSpace project has just completed a stage of work that
> demonstrates both the richness and practicality of RDF and the CIDOC CRM
> ontology. A working prototype shows how a collaborative research
> environment can be constructed exclusively using a triple store and which
> forms the basis for further development towards a production system during
> the year. It serves the British Museum's 2 million digitised records with a
> harmonised dataset from the RKD, with other datasets will be included in
> short course.
>
> The use of CIDOC CRM, the only ontology able to represent the full
> richness of cultural heritage data like the British Museum's collection
> and, at the same time, provide quality semantic data harmonisation over
> entirely different datasets, is achieved with minimal specialisation. This
> provides the basis for practical user applications that work across
> different institutional data sources - with institutional context (or
> knowledge) intact. The project is gradually adding more integrated apps.
>
> The approach to CRM mapping is to provide a choice of constructs that are
> portable (and non-contentious) for use by other organisations for different
> concepts like, production, acquisition, inscription, visual depiction and
> so on. It is the combination of RDF and a strong ___domain ontology (CIDOC
> CRM) that creates the opportunity for sustainable cross organisation user
> applications.
>
> A video of the search system using condensed CRM relationships for a
> general user interface is available on the home page of
> www.ResearchSpace.org. The search returns objects but could equally
> return bibliographical and biographical data.
>
> I guess my provocation to the list is this. Given the lack of useful,
> sophisticated end user applications that can robustly span different data
> sources, isn't it time to look seriously at ontologies like the CRM that
> provide a solid basis for highly practical solutions for wide ranging
> audiences?
>
> Dominic
>
> Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android
>



-- 
Jeff Mixter
jeffmixter@gmail.com
440-773-9079