So if linked data and general shareability relies on good metadata, and good metadata is created across many memory insitutions, what is the metadata model by which all this stuff, across all of these types of insitutions, is managed?
Libraries, archives and museums all have different frameworks within which their respective metadata standards are created and applied (to varying degrees of actual standardisation), but is there something that we could be doing as a memory sector that could help better expose our stuff across professional and insitutional boundaries – like some common entities with some common relationships?
So maybe we should discuss a national memory sector entity model as either a bunch of baloney or a potential way to better enable federated access and reuse?
Possible entities:
Creating Entities: Organisations, groups, families, people
Content Entities: Collections, Series (in the archival sense and are they they same as collections for this purpose?), items (which could include documents as lower level agregations of items with parts relationships), objects….
Relating to entities (but with a better title): Places, subjects, functions
Questions:
If there are some of these we can standardise across the sector, what would the benefits and challenges be?
And if it is possible, what are the two authorities to start with? People and places maybe?
And if we has such a model, how could it be flexible enough for archives, libraries, museums to implement their different description or cataloguing standards and still allow for better shariness. This is also, the how the heck would it work question.
What are the obvious relationships?
So it goes.
Hi Mark,
I am, of course, interested in pursuing this discussion in this forum and hope that others (including some who are not archivists) will be too.
Semantics are really important when we start to think about a cross-domain model. A huge amount of really useful work has already been done in the cultural heritage sector and is now manifest 🙂 in the CIDOC CRM. I would suggest that’s a really good place to start. The entities modelled derive from some fairly solid philosophical thinking and the whole model is based on continuum concepts – change over time and fixity in time (not only for the things described, but also for the model itself). It’s well worth looking at. Here are a couple of links for starters:
www.cidoc-crm.org/
www.cidoc-crm.org/cidoc_graphical_representation_v_5_1/class_hierarchy.html
The recordkeeping notion of creating entities and content entities needs to iron out its semantics (I believe) – entities are entities; notions of creation (and similar) belong in the space between the entities (the way they relate to each other).
I’m definitely interested in talking more – on this occasion and others.
Cheers,
Kay
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