The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) provides an extensible

ontology Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...

for

concept A concept is an abstract idea that serves as a foundation for more concrete principles, thoughts, and beliefs. Concepts play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied within such disciplines as linguistics, ...

s and

information Information is an Abstraction, abstract concept that refers to something which has the power Communication, to inform. At the most fundamental level, it pertains to the Interpretation (philosophy), interpretation (perhaps Interpretation (log ...

cultural heritage Cultural heritage is the heritage of tangible and intangible heritage assets of a group or society that is inherited from past generations. Not all heritages of past generations are "heritage"; rather, heritage is a product of selection by socie ...

and

museum A museum is an institution dedicated to displaying or Preservation (library and archive), preserving culturally or scientifically significant objects. Many museums have exhibitions of these objects on public display, and some have private colle ...

documentation Documentation is any communicable material that is used to describe, explain or instruct regarding some attributes of an object, system or procedure, such as its parts, assembly, installation, maintenance, and use. As a form of knowledge managem ...

. It is the

international standard An international standard is a technical standard developed by one or more international standards organizations. International standards are available for consideration and use worldwide. The most prominent such organization is the International O ...

(

ISO The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Me ...

21127:2023) for the controlled exchange of cultural heritage information. Galleries, libraries,

archive An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials, in any medium, or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organ ...

s ( GLAMs), and other cultural institutions are encouraged to use the CIDOC CRM to enhance accessibility to museum-related information and

knowledge Knowledge is an Declarative knowledge, awareness of facts, a Knowledge by acquaintance, familiarity with individuals and situations, or a Procedural knowledge, practical skill. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is oft ...

History

The CIDOC CRM emerged from the CIDOC Documentation Standards Group in the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums. Initially, until 1994, the work focused on developing an entity-relationship model for museum information, however, in 1996, the approach shifted to object-oriented modeling methodologies, resulting in the first ''"CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM)"'' in 1999. The process of standardizing the CIDOC CRM began in 2000 and was completed in 2006 with its acceptance as the ISO 21127 standard. The standard was updated and a revised edition was published in 2023.

Aims

The overall aim of the CIDOC CRM is to provide a

reference model A reference model—in systems engineering, systems, enterprise engineering, enterprise, and software engineering—is an abstract framework or domain-specific ontology (information science), ontology consisting of an interlinked set of clearly defi ...

and information standard that museums, and other cultural heritage institutions, can use to describe their collections, and related business entities, to improve information sharing.

The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) provides definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation...to promote a shared understanding of cultural heritage information by providing a common and extensible semantic framework that any cultural heritage information can be mapped to. It is intended to be a common language for domain experts and implementers to formulate requirements for information systems and to serve as a guide for good practice of conceptual modelling. In this way, it can provide the "semantic glue" needed to mediate between different sources of cultural heritage information, such as that published by museums, libraries and archives.

By adopting formal semantics for the CIDOC CRM, the pre-conditions for machine-to-machine interoperability and integration have been established. Thus, CIDOC CRM is well placed to become an important information standard and reference model for

Semantic Web The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

initiatives, and serves as a guide for

data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted for ...

, or

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

, modeling more generally. Technically speaking, CIDOC CRM lends itself to software applications that extensively use

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

and RDF. Many cultural heritage institutions are investigating or building applications that use CIDOC CRM. Following the successful standardization of the CIDOC CRM, a new initiative, FRBRoo, was begun in 2006 to harmonize it with the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). The aim of this initiative is to "provide a formal ontology intended to capture and represent the underlying semantics of bibliographic information and to facilitate the integration, mediation, and interchange of bibliographic and museum information."

Ontology

The "CIDOC object-oriented Conceptual Reference Model" (CRM) is a domain ontology, but includes its own version of an upper ontology. The core classes cover: ; Space-Time : includes title/identifier, place, era/period, time-span, and relationship to persistent items ; Events : includes title/identifier, beginning/ending of existence, participants (people, either individually or in groups), creation/modification of things (physical or conceptional), and relationship to persistent items ; Material Things : includes title/identifier, place, the information object the material thing carries, part-of relationships, and relationship to persistent items ; Immaterial Things : includes title/identifier, information objects (propositional or symbolic), conceptional things, and part-of relationships Examples of definitions: ; Persistent Item : a physical or conceptional item that has a persistent identity recognized within the duration of its existence by its identification rather than by its continuity or by observation. A Persistent Item is comparable to an endurant. ; Temporal Entity : includes events, eras/periods, and condition states which happen over a limited extent in time, and is disjoint with Persistent Item. A Temporal Entity is comparable to a perdurant. ; Propositional Object : a set of statements about real or imaginary things. ; Symbolic Object : a sign/symbol or an aggregation of signs/symbols.

CIDOC CRM Implementations and Systems

* The CIDOC CRM has been implemented in OWL DL a
Erlangen CRM/OWL
(ECRM) * The ECRM (and thus CIDOC CRM) is used extensively in the WissKI system, an ontology based virtual research environment for managing primary research data in the area of

as linked data.

References

External links

The CIDOC CRM Website

Erlangen CRM/OWL web site and OWL sources
{{Authority control Cultural heritage Knowledge representation languages International Council of Museums Reference models ISO standards Ontology languages Museum informatics