Re: looking for an event ontology/vocabulary

On Jul 30, 2009, at 8:17 AM, Ryan Shaw wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 10:48 PM, Richard
> Light<richard@light.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Another ontology/vocabulary which is centred around events is the  
>> CIDOC CRM
>> (Conceptual Reference Model). [1]  It is "a formal ontology  
>> intended to
>> facilitate the integration, mediation and interchange of  
>> heterogeneous
>> cultural heritage information", and comes out of the museums  
>> community.
>> There is an OWL representation [2] which has been developed by a  
>> group at
>> Erlangen-Nuremburg University.  It certainly doesn't lack  
>> definitions ;-)
>>
>> I would be interested to hear what Linked Data folks make of it as a
>> potential framework for expressing more general event-related  
>> assertions,
>> i.e. going beyond its stated scope.  I would also value a more expert
>> opinion than my own as to whether the current expression of the CRM  
>> (either
>> the OWL or RDF [3] version) is "fit for purpose" as a Linked Data  
>> ontology.
>
> We discuss the CIDOC CRM extensively in our tech report, which I will
> post a link to here as soon as it is available. I personally am of the
> opinion that it is overengineered for Linked Data purposes. But I am
> willing to be convinced otherwise. In any case, though the CIDOC spec
> discusses historical events, I have been unable to find any examples
> of people actually using it to model historical events (a recent post
> to the CRM-SIG mailing list asking for examples turned up nothing).
>


I think that might have been my post. I received some private replies  
telling of CRM-based RDF being used at some museums, but unlikely to  
ever be made open to the public.

There's much to like about CRM -- not the least of which is the active  
and helpful community -- but I've concluded that it's overly  
normalized for what I'm trying to do, which is to link data about  
ancient inscriptions to data about places of the classical world.  
Inscriptions are found or observed at places, but in the CRM this  
relationship is always mediated by an event: an inscription is  
discovered during a "finding event", which occurred at some place. We  
are not ready to mint resources for all these events, most of which  
will never be reused, and so we're bypassing and using non-CRM  
properties to relate inscriptions and places.

--
Sean Gillies
Software Engineer
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
New York University

Received on Thursday, 30 July 2009 11:46:07 UTC