BS-ISO-21127-2006.pdf

BRITISH STANDARD BS ISO 21127:2006 Information and documentation A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information ICS 35.240.30 ? Licensed Copy: sheffieldun sheffieldun, na, Sat Nov 25 13:27:15 GMT+00:00 2006, Uncontrolled Copy, (c) BSI BS ISO 21127:2006 This British Standard was published under the authority of the Standards Policy and Strategy Committee on 31 October 2006 © BSI 2006 ISBN 0 580 49401 2 National foreword This British Standard was published by BSI. It is the UK implementation of ISO 21127:2006. The UK participation in its preparation was entrusted by Technical Committee IDT/2, Information and documentation, to Subcommittee IDT/2/7, Computer applications in information and documentation. A list of organizations represented on IDT/2/7 can be obtained on request to its secretary. This publication does not purport to include all the necessary provisions of a contract. Users are responsible for its correct application. Compliance with a British Standard cannot confer immunity from legal obligations. Amendments issued since publication Amd. No. DateComments Licensed Copy: sheffieldun sheffieldun, na, Sat Nov 25 13:27:15 GMT+00:00 2006, Uncontrolled Copy, (c) BSI Reference number ISO 21127:2006(E) INTERNATIONAL STANDARD ISO 21127 First edition 2006-09-15 Information and documentation A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information Information et documentation Une ontologie de référence pour l'échange d'informations du patrimoine culturel BS ISO 21127:2006 Licensed Copy: sheffieldun sheffieldun, na, Sat Nov 25 13:27:15 GMT+00:00 2006, Uncontrolled Copy, (c) BSI ii Licensed Copy: sheffieldun sheffieldun, na, Sat Nov 25 13:27:15 GMT+00:00 2006, Uncontrolled Copy, (c) BSI iii Contents Page Foreword iv Introduction v 1 Scope . 1 2 Conformance. 2 3 Terms and definitions. 2 4 Structure and presentation 6 4.1 Property quantifiers 6 4.2 Naming conventions. 8 5 Modelling principles. 8 5.1 Monotonicity 8 5.2 Minimality 9 5.3 Shortcuts . 9 5.4 Disjointness. 9 5.5 Types 10 5.6 Extensions. 10 5.7 Coverage of intended scope 11 6 Class declarations 11 7 Property declarations. 55 Annex A (informative) Class hierarchy 101 Annex B (informative) Property hierarchy. 103 Bibliography. 108 BS ISO 21127:2006 Licensed Copy: sheffieldun sheffieldun, na, Sat Nov 25 13:27:15 GMT+00:00 2006, Uncontrolled Copy, (c) BSI iv Foreword ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies (ISO member bodies). The work of preparing International Standards is normally carried out through ISO technical committees. Each member body interested in a subject for which a technical committee has been established has the right to be represented on that committee. International organizations, governmental and non-governmental, in liaison with ISO, also take part in the work. ISO collaborates closely with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) on all matters of electrotechnical standardization. International Standards are drafted in accordance with the rules given in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2. The main task of technical committees is to prepare International Standards. Draft International Standards adopted by the technical committees are circulated to the member bodies for voting. Publication as an International Standard requires approval by at least 75 % of the member bodies casting a vote. Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this document may be the subject of patent rights. ISO shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights. ISO 21127 was prepared by Technical Committee ISO/TC 46, Information and documentation, Subcommittee SC 4, Technical interoperability, in collaboration with the International Council of Museums Committee for Documentation (ICOM CIDOC). BS ISO 21127:2006 Licensed Copy: sheffieldun sheffieldun, na, Sat Nov 25 13:27:15 GMT+00:00 2006, Uncontrolled Copy, (c) BSI v Introduction This International Standard is the culmination of more than a decade of standards development work by the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Work on this International Standard began in 1996 under the auspices of the ICOM-CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group. Throughout its development, the model has been known as the “CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model” or CRM. References to the CRM can be considered throughout as synonymous with ISO 21127. The primary purpose of this International Standard is to offer a conceptual basis for the mediation of information between cultural heritage organizations such as museums, libraries and archives. This International Standard aims to provide a common reference point against which divergent and incompatible sources of information can be compared and, ultimately, harmonized. ISO 21127 is a domain ontology 1) for cultural heritage information: a formal representation of the conceptual scheme, or “world view”, underlying the database applications and documentation systems that are used by cultural heritage institutions. It is important to note that this International Standard aims to clarify the logic of what cultural heritage institutions do in fact document; it is not intended as a normative specification of what they should document. The primary role of this International Standard is to enable information exchange and integration between heterogeneous sources of cultural heritage information. It aims to provide the semantic definitions and clarifications needed to transform disparate, localized information sources into a coherent global resource, be it within an institution, an intranet or on the Internet. The specific aims of this International Standard are to: Serve as a common language for domain experts and IT developers when formulating requirements. Serve as a formal language for the identification of common information contents in different data formats; in particular to support the implementation of automatic data transformation algorithms from local to global data structures without loss of meaning. These transformation algorithms are useful for data exchange, data migration from legacy systems, data information integration, and mediation of heterogeneous sources. Support associative queries against integrated resources by providing a global model of the basic classes and their associations to formulate such queries. Provide developers of information systems with a guide to good practice in conceptual modelling. The CRM ontology is expressed as a series of interrelated concepts with definitions. This presentation is similar to that used for a thesaurus. However, the ontology is not intended as a terminology standard and does not set out to define the terms that are typically used as data in cultural heritage documentation. Although the presentation provided here is complete, it is an intentionally compact and concise presentation of the ontology's 80 classes and 130 unique properties. It does not attempt to articulate the inheritance of properties by subclasses throughout the class hierarchy (this would require the declaration of several thousand properties, as opposed to 130). However, this definition does contain all the information needed to infer and automatically generate a full declaration of all properties, including inherited properties. 1) In the sense used in computer science, i.e. it describes in a formal language the relevant explicit and implicit concepts and the relationships between them 1. BS ISO 21127:2006 Licensed Copy: sheffieldun sheffieldun, na, Sat Nov 25 13:27:15 GMT+00:00 2006, Uncontrolled Copy, (c) BSI blank Licensed Copy: sheffieldun sheffieldun, na, Sat Nov 25 13:27:15 GMT+00:00 2006, Uncontrolled Copy, (c) BSI 1 Information and documentation A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information 1 Scope This International Standard establishes guidelines for the exchange of information between cultural heritage institutions. In simple terms this can be defined as the curated knowledge of museums. A more detailed definition can be articulated by defining both the intended scope, a broad and maximally inclusive definition of general principles, and the practical scope, which is defined by reference to a set of specific museum documentation standards and practices. The intended scope of this International Standard is defined as the exchange and integration of heterogeneous scientific documentation relating to museum collections. This definition requires further elaboration: The term “scientific documentation” is intended to convey the requirement that the depth and quality of descriptive information that can be handled by this International Standard need be sufficient for serious academic research. This does not mean that information intended for presentation to members of the general public is excluded, but rather that this International Standard is intended to provide the level of detail and precision expected and required by museum professionals and researchers in the field. The term “museum collections” is intended to cover all types of material collected and displayed by museums and related institutions, as defined by ICOM 2). This includes collections, sites, and monuments relating to fields such as social history, ethnography, archaeology, fine and applied arts, natural history, history of sciences and technology. The documentation of collections includes the detailed description of individual items within collections, groups of items and collections as a whole. This International Standard is specifically intended to cover contextual information (i.e. the historical, geographical, and theoretical background that gives museum collections much of their cultural significance and value). The exchange of relevant information with libraries and archives, and harmonization with their models, falls within the intended scope of this International Standard. Information required solely for the administration and management of cultural institutions, such as information relating to personnel, accounting and visitor statistics, falls outside the intended scope of this International Standard. The practical scope 3) of this International Standard is the set of reference standards for museum documentation that have been used to guide and validate its development. This International Standard covers the same domain of discourse as the union of these reference documents; this means that data correctly encoded according to any of these reference documents can be expressed in a compatible form, without any loss of meaning. 2) The ICOM Statutes provide a definition of the term “museum” at . 3) The practical scope of the CIDOC CRM, including a list of the relevant museum documentation standards, is discussed in more detail on the CIDOC CRM website at . BS ISO 21127:2006 Licensed Copy: sheffieldun sheffieldun, na, Sat Nov 25 13:27:15 GMT+00:00 2006, Uncontrolled Copy, (c) BSI 2 2 Conformance Users intending to take advantage of the semantic interoperability offered by this International Standard should ensure conformance with the relevant data structures. Conformance pertains either to data to be made accessible in an integrated environment, or to contents intended for transport to other environments. Any encoding of data in a formal language that preserves the relations of the classes, properties and inheritance rules defined by this International Standard is regarded as conformant. Conformance with this International Standard does not require complete matching of all local documentation structures, nor that all concepts and structures present in this International Standard be implemented. This International Standard is intended to allow room both for extensions, needed to capture the full richness of cultural information, and for simplification, in the interests of economy. A system will be deemed partially conformant if it supports a subset of subclasses and subproperties defined by this International Standard. Designers of the system should publish details of the constructs that are supported. The focus of this International Standard is on the transport and mediation of structured information. It does not provide or require interpretation of unstructured free-text information into a structured, logical form. Free-text information, while supported, falls outside the scope of conformance considerations. Any documentation system will be deemed conformant with this International Standard, regardless of the internal data structures it uses, if a deterministic logical algorithm can be constructed that transforms data contained in the system into a directly compatible form without loss of meaning. No assumptions are made as to the nature of this algorithm. “Without loss of meaning” signifies that designers and users of the system are satisfied that the data representation corresponds to the semantic definitions provided by this International Standard. 3 Terms and definitions For the purposes of this document, the following terms and definitions apply. We have selected these terms for ease of understanding by non-computer experts from the various terminologies in use for object-oriented models. 3.1 class category of items that share one or more common properties NOTE Class properties serve as criteria to identify items that belong to the class. These properties need not be explicitly formulated in logical terms, but can be described in a text (called a scope note) that refers to a common conceptualisation of domain experts. The sum of these properties is called the intension of the class. A class can be the domain or range of none, one, or more properties formally defined in a model. The formally defined properties need not be part of the intension of their domains or ranges: such properties are optional. An item that belongs to a class is called an instance of this class. A class is associated with an open set of real-life instances, known as the extension of the class. Here “open” is used in the sense that it is generally beyond our capabilities to know all instances of a class in the world and, indeed, that the future can bring new instances into being at any time (Open World). Therefore a class cannot be defined by enumerating its instances. A class plays a role analogous to a grammatical noun, and can be completely defined without reference to any other construct (unlike properties, which need to have an unambiguously defined domain and range). For example, “Person” is a class. A “Person” can have the property of being a member of a “Group”, but this is not a necessary condition for being a “Person”. We will never know all “Persons” who have lived in the past, and there will be more “Persons” in the future. Classes are usually organized