ISO 21127 aka CIDOC CRM - more metadata dejavu
Most of my colleagues in the environmental sciences wont have come across ISO 21227 (to be fair, it may not yet exist, but heck, most of my colleagues in environmental science haven't come across any ISO standard ...). I was introduced to the concepts behind it by my colleague Matthew Stiff, from the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), and I've just been nosying through a powerpoint tutorial, which introduce the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Modle (CRM) (ppt) which would appear to be the heart of it. Maybe the topic: Information and documentation -- A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information isn't going to engage too many of my colleagues, but maybe it should because the key concept is that:
Semantic interoperability in culture can be achieved by an ?extensible ontology of relationships? and explicit event modeling, that provides shared explanation rather than prescription of a common data structure.
That sounds familiar, if we change "events" to "observations", and replace "in culture" with "in environmental science" we'd all be on the same page ... although maybe some of my hard science mates wouldn't like the word relationships ...
Reading on we find that the CIDOC CRM aims to approximate a conceptualisation of real world phenomena ... sounds like the feature type model approximating the universe of discourse to me ... One key difference from the GML world though is the early acceptance of objects (features in my language) having multiple inheritance (which is hard to do in XML schema, hence a problem for GML).
I'm not the first to make the link between the ISO/OGC world and the CIDOC world of course, Martin Doerr who is one of the CIDOC authors made the connection explicit in a comparison of the CIDOC CRM with an early version of what became GML (pdf). Regrettably his conclusions are a bit dated now (five years is a long time on our business). It'd be interesting if someone did a comparison of the OGC Observations and Measures spec (or the new draft) with the CIDOC CRM ... meanwhile, when I can get my hands on the standard itself, it may make interesting reading to help inform our semantic web developments.
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tttzufzde on Monday 09 August, 2010: