CRMgeo: A spatiotemporal extension of CIDOC-CRM

Abstract

CRMgeo is a formal ontology intended to be used as a global schema for integrating spatiotemporal properties of temporal entities and persistent items. Its primary purpose is to provide a schema consistent with the CIDOC CRM to integrate geoinformation using the conceptualizations, formal definitions, encoding standards and topological relations defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium in GeoSPARQL. To build the ontology, the same ontology engineering methodology was used as in the CIDOC CRM. CRMgeo first introduced the concept of Spacetime volume that was subsequently included in the CIDOC CRM and provides a differentiation between phenomenal and declarative Spacetime volume, Place and Time-Span. Phenomenal classes derive their identity from real world phenomena like events or things and declarative classes derive their identity from human declarations like dates or coordinates. This differentiation is an essential conceptual background to link CIDOC CRM to the classes, topological relations and encodings provided by Geo-SPARQL and thus allowing Lehrstuhl für Digital Humanities, Universität Passau, Passau, Germany spatiotemporal analysis offered by geoinformation systems based on the semantic distinctions of the CIDOC CRM. CRMgeo introduces the classes and relations necessary to model the spatiotemporal properties of real world phenomena and their topological and semantic relations to spatiotemporal information about these phenomena that was derived from historic sources, maps, observations or measurements. It is able to model the full chain of approximating and finding again a phenomenal place, like the actual site of a ship wreck, by a declarative place, like a mark on a sea chart.

FAIR data for prehistoric mining archaeology

“…Figure 7 gives an overview of the CIDOC CRM family of models with CIDOC CRM core on top and its extensions below. The red circles indicate which extensions are used for FAIR data representation to further detail the investigated objects (CRMarchaeo [15]), the activities investigating them (CRMarchaeo and CRMsci [16]), the conclusions that have been drawn (CRMinf [17]) and the data that have been created (CRMdig [18] and CRMgeo [19]). The CRMarchaeo extension is used to model the details of archaeological excavations that are documented in the Federal Monuments Office guidelines.…”

Deepwater Archaeological Survey: An Interdisciplinary and Complex Process

“…A further step, after developing and populating the ontology, is to find target ontologies to link to, following semantic web recommendations (Bizer et al 2009); linking the newly published ontology to other existent ontologies in the web in order to allow ontologies sharing, exchanging and reusing information between them. In cultural heritage contexts, CIDOC CRM is our main target ontology since it is now well adopted by CH actors from theoretical point of view (Gaitanou et al 2016;Niccolucci 2016;Niccolucci and Hermon 2016) as well as applicative works (Araújo et al 2018) and an interesting direction toward GIS application based on some connection with photogrammetric survey (Hiebel et al 2014(Hiebel et al , 2016.…”

Enhancing CIDOC-CRM and compatible models with the concept of multiple interpretation

“…To easily link CIDOC-CRM to GEOSPARQL CRMgeo, an ontology integrating spatiotemporal properties of CIDOC-CRM items, proposed to separate real world classes (called phenomenal classes) from information classes (called declarative classes). (Hiebel et al, 2016). This distinction between the real word and the world described by information concerns time and geometry dimensions only.…”

“…Nevertheless, the spatiotemporal properties exist and CRMgeo introduces them as Phenomenal Spacetime Volume (SP1), Phenomenal Place (SP2) and Phenomenal Time Span (SP13) as subclasses of Spacetime Volume (E92), Place (E53) and Time Span (E52)." (Hiebel et al, 2016). Table 1.…”