Re: RDF and CIDOC CRM

On 6/12/13 3:39 PM, Dominic Oldman 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
>

Good stuff!

Questions:

Is <http://www.cidoc-crm.org/rdfs/cidoc_crm_v5.1-draft-2013May.rdfs> the 
correct URL for the document that describes this ontology? If that's 
true, then who should I contact with regards to any subtle tweaks? For 
instance, the ontology would benefit from some rdfs:isDefinedBy and 
wdsr:describedby relations. Those relations makes it easier to explore 
the ontology via a Linked Data browser.

Anyway, I've applied the suggestions above to our URIBurner instance [1][2].

Links:

1. 
http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/describe/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cidoc-crm.org%2Frdfs%2Fcidoc_crm_v5.1-draft-2013%2F 
-- deep and faceted follow-your-nose oriented Linked Data exploration page

2. 
http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/describe/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cidoc-crm.org%2Fcidoc-crm%2FE46_Section_Definition 
-- page showing effects of adding the suggested relations



-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
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