RDF and CIDOC CRM

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

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