CIDOC CRM is the established ontology for museum and culture data description. ISO 21127 standard

The most important resources are marked with and are required to get yourself acquainted with CRM.
Additional resources are marked with .

CRM Description

CIDOC CRM consists of 86 classes and 137 properties.

• Class and property names start with numeric identifiers, prefixed by letter "E" (entity) for Class and "P" for Property.
• Each property is split in two for the Forward (domain to range) and Backward/Inverse (range to domain) direction.
  Eg "P2 has type (is type of)" is represented as: "P2F.has_type" and "P2B.is_type_of" (or P2I)

CRM resources

• CRM SIG mailing list: crm-sig@ics.forth.gr, archives, Search
• CRM issue tracking: http://www.cidoc-crm.org/work_progress.php
• Examples v6, including interesting infinitely-nested XML representation (much simpler than RDF/XML)
• "Data Example of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model- Epitaphios GE3460, September 2007. Available as: html, word, xml, pdf, rdf"

CRM Tutorial

• Video Tutorial, including presentation (crm_for_Crete_film.ppt) and transcript, correlated to the slides (crm_lecture.doc)
• Single HTML page: nice for reading on screen in continuous view
  • Use "crmt" shortcut to refer to a particular slide, eg slide45@crmt shows Image
• Zipped HTML page
• PDF page per slide, landscape, with transcript
• Kindle file: excellent in both orientations

CRM Specification

• release 5.0.2 (Jan 2010): cidoc_crm_version_5.0.2.doc, cidoc_crm_version_5.0.2.pdf (local attachment)
• release 5.0.1 (Mar 2009) with cross-reference links (RAR)
• Introduction describes the purpose, scope and modeling principles
  • Kindle file
• Cross-referenced. From Appendix>Editorial: "hypertext document... the only one, that allows for fully understanding the model by reading and for using it in conceptual modelling". The reason is that to really understand a concept, you need to look at its neighbors (sub/super classes, related properties, sub/super properties)
  • Use the "crm" shortcut to refer to a particular entity or property, eg E1 CRM Entity@crm, P1 is identified by (identifies)@crm
  • (Note: this links to the original entity_list and the anchors may not work in some browsers. The anchors in my entity_list_cleaned use underscores and dashes instead of spaces and parentheses, eg P1_is_identified_by--identifies
  • Kindle file

Minimal reduced (core) graphical representation

• HTML separate screens
• PPT (original)

Full graphical representation

CRM 5.0.1. Includes 34 screens (subject areas)

• HTML separate screens
• HTML single page
  • Use "crmg" shortcut to link to a particular screen, eg image_objects_carriers@crmg
  • Added comments (get-comments.pl), shortened not to repeat the diagram title
• Kindle file, works great in landscape orientation
• PPT (Original)
• PPT with comments
  • Added Class Hierarchy

CRM RDF and OWL Representations

• RDFS with English labels by the official CIDOC group (local attachment
  • has three encodings that vary by name only: E1 vs E1_ vs E1.CRM_Entity (English labels). We prefer English labels for understandability and robustness
  • includes "." in class/property names, which is Turtle & Sparql-unfriendly (Ontology Reviews#Naming in Turtle and Sparql):
    cidoc-ids.txt
  • mentions inverse properties, but does not define them as inverseOf
  • the file doesn't have a defined namespace, and http://www.cidoc-crm.org/rdfs/cidoc_crm_v5.0.2_english_label.rdfs would be too brittle to use!
  • somewhere else I saw the following namespaces:
    http://www.cidoc-crm.org/rdfs/cidoc-crm-english-label : RDFS English labels
    http://www.cidoc-crm.org/rdfs/cidoc-crm : RDFS generic
• OWL DL (Erlangen): http://erlangen-crm.org/
  • Current Version ecrm_current.owl: Erlangen CRM / OWL 2011-04-04 based on CIDOC CRM 5.0.2 January 2010
  • Nice cross-reference: http://erlangen-crm.org/docs/current/
  • names are Turtle&Sparql-friendly
    ecrm-ids.txt
  • defines inverseOf properties; but these are not interpreted by http://morph.talis.com/, which Jana uses for RForms
  • defines namespace http://erlangen-crm.org/current/
• OWL2 DL (Simon Reinhardt): http://bloody-byte.net/rdf/cidoc-crm/
  • Alternative to the existing RDFS and OWL DL versions, making use of new OWL2 constructs for a more accurate representation of the model, and uses stable, host- and version-independent URIs. See other important notes there!
  • version 5.0.1: Turtle, RDF/XML
  • OWL/XML, converted using http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk/converter/
  • can be verbalized to English by Attempto but is not very useful
    "Everything that is P107_has_current_or_former_member by something is an E39_Actor"
  • does not even include names of inverse properties
    owl2-ids.txt
  • defines namespace http://purl.org/NET/cidoc-crm/core#

CRM Usage

Claros

Claros is a UK project to aggregate a number of UK museum collections in a semantic repository (like a UK-local Europeana)

• Claros best practices for representing objects, places, periods, etc.
  In some cases uses Claros extensions to CRM
• Description of Claros Thesaurus