The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model provides the extensible ontology for concepts and information in cultural heritage documentation. It is the international standard (ISO 21127:2006)^[1] for controlled exchange of cultural heritage information. Archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions are encouraged to use the CIDOC CRM to enhance accessibility of knowledge. CIDOC is the Committee on Documentation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). ... In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them. ... A concept is an abstract idea or a mental symbol, typically associated with a corresponding representation in language or symbology, that denotes all of the objects in a given category or class of entities, interactions, phenomena, or relationships between them. ... Information is the result of processing, manipulating and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the person receiving it. ... Cultural heritage (national heritage or just heritage) is the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations. ... Information science is an interdisciplinary science primarily concerned with the collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information. ... Standards are produced by many organizations, some for internal usage only, others for use by a groups of people, groups of companies, or a subsection of an industry. ... The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from national standards bodies. ... For other uses of the word Archive, see Archive (disambiguation) Archives refers to a collection of records, and also refers to the location in which these records are kept. ... A modern-style library in Chambéry A library is a collection of information resources and services, organized for use, and maintained by a political body, institution, or private individual. ... The Louvre Museum in Paris, one of the largest and most famous museums in the world. ... Personification of knowledge (Greek Επιστημη, Episteme) in Celsus Library in Ephesos, Turkey. ...

The task of the CIDOC CRM is to collect the various types of information about cultural heritage systematically and to provide the general framework of their formal semantics. Thus every single piece of information can be assigned to the concepts of the CIDOC CRM. At the same time this process creates important pre-conditions for the information integration, because the CIDOC CRM can be used as a source for the development of tools for scheme transformation and scheme integration as well. The CIDOC CRM supports the formulation of needs for information systems and can serve as guideline and help for semantic, data, or database modeling. In theoretical computer science formal semantics is the field concerned with the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages and models of computation. ... Information Integration is a field of study known by various terms, Information Fusion, Deduplication, Referential Integrity and so on. ... The term information system has the following meanings: 1. ... In computer science, data modeling is the process of applying a data model theory to create a data model instance. ... A database model is a theory or specification describing how a database is structured and used. ...

Technologies like XML and RDF are supported by the CIDOC CRM. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language that supports a wide variety of applications. ... Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata model using XML but which has come to be used as a general method of modeling knowledge, through a variety of syntax formats (XML and non-XML). ...

History

The CIDOC CRM emerged from the Documentation Standards Group^[2] in the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums CIDOC. Until 1994 the entity-relationship model for museum information was created. In 1996 the method was changed to object-oriented modeling, thus 1999 resulting in the first "CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM)". In 2000 the procedure to establish the CIDOC CRM as international Standard (ISO) started. CIDOC is the Committee on Documentation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). ... In computer science, an entity-relationship model (ERM) is a model providing a high-level description of a conceptual data model. ... Object-Oriented Modeling, or OOM, is a modeling paradigm mainly used in computer programming. ... The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from national standards bodies. ...

External links

• The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model
• T. Gill: Making sense of cultural infodiversity: The CIDOC-CRM. 2002
• Regine Stein, Jürgen Gottschewski u.a.: Das CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model: Eine Hilfe für den Datenaustausch? Berlin, 2005 (German)

References

1. ^ ISO 21127:2006 (Information and documentation -- A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information)
2. ^ CIDOC Documentation Standards Group