Standards and interfaces for interdisciplinary knowledge modelling and data exchange of heterogeneous systems
Standards for semantic description of object data. The foundation for interoperability.
Description
Project leads: Florian Thiery (LEIZA), Anja Gerber (KSW), Fabian Fricke (DAI)
The NFDI4Objects consortium focuses on the physical legacies of human and environmental history. These objects must always be considered in relation to actors, events, time periods and places: who did what, when, where, with a particular object. Events place objects within a specific context, which provides more detailed information about them and reveals connections between the people, places and time periods associated with them. This approach to the digital object biography involves event-based, research-driven data processing, in which objects are linked to all available information about their individual stages, as well as the sources from which the information originates.
The primary aim of this service is to develop an application ontology supported by NFDI4Objects (NFDI4Objects Object Ontology; N4O OO) supported by NFDI4Objects, in order to optimally prepare and make available the consortium’s heterogeneous data for integration into the consortium’s knowledge graph. This ontology is being developed in collaboration with the researchers and stakeholders working within the consortium, based on use cases within the TWG “Development of a common NFDI4Objects Object Ontology (N4O OO) and a Minimal Metadata Set (N4O MMDS)”. Coordination of content with the other humanities and cultural studies consortia in the so-called Memorandum of Understanding Group, comprising NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Memory, NFDI4Objects and Text+, to ensure interoperability is guaranteed through collaboration in various working groups. Other related consortia, such as NFDI4Earth, NFDI4Biodiversity, etc., are also involved in the development processes to cover the natural science aspects.
The ontology contains elements of an object biography, which is enriched with information through the work carried out in Task Areas 1–4: ‘Documentation’, ‘Collecting’, ‘Analysis & Experiments’ and ‘Protecting’. This covers, amongst other things, subject areas such as excavation, (digital) reconstruction and annotation, collection, art history, restoration/conservation, scientific analysis, heritage conservation, provenance research, etc. This approach takes the specific subject of the research – the object – as its starting point for developing the data structures. Consequently, ontology development is research-driven and oriented towards the object lifecycle. Through the use of community standards and dialogue with the community, this approach is appropriate for the research subject and can also be integrated into general data management.
The modelling of an object’s biography is based, amongst other things, on the reference model CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM) in order to capture the life cycle of an object in various contexts; however, it is built upon a Minimal Metadata Set (N4O MMDS). The object ontology and the minimal metadata schema are defined by the technical work programme of the NFDI4Objects Task Areas and are further developed by the community. To ensure that the consortium’s heterogeneous data can be consolidated, the elements/attributes of the NFDI4Objects Minimal Metadata Set, i.e. which information is absolutely essential for describing object data as it progresses through the object lifecycle.
The NFDI4Objects Minimum Metadata Set (N4O MMDS) and the NFDI4Objects Objects Ontology (N4O OO), as its RDF representation for semantic web applications, map the object lifecycle at the formal data level. The data flow in the Consortium’s Knowledge Graph currently includes, amongst other things, LIDO/XML and RDF.