RE: CIDOC, alternative to Harmony

Hi Mark,

I think your analysis of the state of play for CIDOC is very accurate.
it's better known to the cultural heritage community and is more
standards-friendly than Harmony (at least to my knowledge, so far).
CIDOC is certainly richer, and more complicated, as you point out.
But it comes from the museum and archive community who have
been working with concepts like provenance for a long time, and
it has had a lot of thought put into it. If we go ahead with Harmony
it may meet our short-term requirements (if we had any) but will it
resonate with the digital archiving community who are supposed
to use this metadata? It's just a question...

MacKenzie/

At 11:22 AM 6/25/2003 +0100, Butler, Mark wrote:
>Hi MacKenzie
>
>I think it is quite hard to say whether CIDOC or Harmony is a preferred
>solution:
>
>- CIDOC is richer than Harmony; but this also means it is more complicated
>e.g. CIDOC has approximately 75 classes and 105 properties, Harmony has
>approximately 13 classes and 20 properties
>
>- CIDOC was originally developed using TELOS, a different way of encoding
>semantic networks predating RDF, but both Harmony and CIDOC are expressable
>in RDF / RDFS
>
>- There is an interesting discussion of the approach adopted when creating
>CIDOC here
>http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/docs/crm-ontology_preprint.pdf
>
>- There seems to be a standards activity around CIDOC, whereas there is no
>formal standards activity around Harmony. This means it may be easier to
>introduce changes into Harmony, or conversly CIDOC is potentially more
>stable
>
>- CIDOC is on track to be an ISO standard, although I note that this tends
>to hold little sway with the web community
>
>Do you have any other observations?
>
>Dr Mark H. Butler
>Research Scientist                HP Labs Bristol
>mark-h_butler@hp.com
>Internet: http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut/
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: MacKenzie Smith [mailto:kenzie@MIT.EDU]
> > Sent: 20 June 2003 18:30
> > To: Butler, Mark
> > Subject: RE: CIDOC, alternative to Harmony
> >
> >
> > Hi Mark,
> >
> > Do you guys ever resolve this question? I was interested in
> > knowing, since the CIDOC standard is far better known in the
> > digital library/cultural heritage institution world than Harmony,
> > and might be easier to explain to people. Did you figure out
> > that Harmony really was the preferred solution?
> >
> > MacKenzie/
> >
> > At 11:25 AM 6/4/2003 +0100, you wrote:
> >
> > >This paper
> > >
> > >http://metadata.net/harmony/JODI_Oct2002.pdf
> > >
> > >Provides a comparison of CIDOC and Harmony.
> > >
> > >M

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building 14S-208
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie@mit.edu

Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 21:03:01 UTC