The Semantic Mapping of Archival Metadata to the CIDOC CRM Ontology

• Published in: Journal of archival organization Vol. 9; no. 3-4; pp. 174 - 207
• Main Authors: Bountouri, Lina, Gergatsoulis, Manolis
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY Taylor & Francis Group 01-07-2011; Routledge; Haworth Information Press
• Subjects: Archives; Archives. Museums; CIDOC CRM; Classification; Concept Mapping; Cultural heritage; Documentation; Documentation institutions; EAD; Encoded Archival Description; Exact sciences and technology; Information and communication sciences; Information processing and retrieval; Information science. Documentation; Interoperability; mappings; Metadata; metadata interoperability; Ontologies; Sciences and techniques of general use; Semantics; Archive; Description; Ontology; CIDOC CRM; Article; Metadata; Cultural heritage; Document; Information; Encoded Archival Description; Interoperability; Hierarchy; Semantics; metadata interoperability; Linguistics; Archives; ontologies; Integration; Architecture; Documentation; Scientific communication; EAD; mappings; Customer Relationship Management; Models
• ISSN: 1533-2748; 1533-2756
• DOI: 10.1080/15332748.2011.650124

In this article we analyze the main semantics of archival description, expressed through Encoded Archival Description (EAD). Our main target is to map the semantics of EAD to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM) ontology as part of a wider integration architecture of cultural heritage metadata. Through this analysis, it is concluded that an EAD document is a hierarchy of documentation elements and attributes and that through this documentation the archive is semantically expressed via 3 hierarchies: hierarchy of physical objects, hierarchy of information objects, and hierarchy of linguistic objects. These semantic views of the archive and its description (e.g., finding aid) as well as their interrelationships are mapped to CIDOC CRM.