Using LIDO for Evolving Object Documentation into CIDOC CRM

Over the last years, many projects and institutions have worked on transforming object documentation from several existing cataloguing systems into a CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM) compliant graph representation, as expressed in RDF. There were also various attempts to provide a generally valid path for the transfer of data from Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO), CIDOC’s recommended XML Schema for metadata harvesting, into representations that are suitable for the Semantic Web. They all face the challenge that a detailed mapping, which fully exploits the CRM’s expressiveness and requires semantic assumptions that may not always turn out to be valid. Broad mappings, on the other hand, fail to leverage the potential of Semantic Web technologies. In this paper, we propose a method for using LIDO combined with an associated terminology as a means of evolving existing object documentation into CRM-based RDF representations. By clearly distinguishing between controlled vocabulary and ontology, it is possible to transform object data relatively easily into a minimized, though efficient structure using the CIDOC CRM ontology. This structure will open up the whole world of Semantic Web technologies to be used for further semantic refinement and data quality analysis through exploiting the underlying controlled vocabularies