Documenting Collections of Bulgarian Museums. Framing a CIDOC-based Ontological Presentation

Report published in the Proceedings of the National Conference on "Education and Research in the Information Society", Plovdiv, May, 2014

The paper offers short analytic survey and comparison between the standard for description of cultural objects, CIDOC-CRM (ISO 21127:2006) and museum passports, inventory books and files, all of which are used in documenting museum artifacts in Bulgaria since 50-s. Three different field-sets have been explored. The fields in use are more than 100. Several case studies and good practices which use CIDOC-CRM, CRMdig, SPECTRUM, LIDO and EDM are shown. The result from their comparison with Bulgarian practices is presented in a table, where 25 fields, taken from Bulgarian passports are listed with respect to three factors: (1) metadata type they are representing, (structural, administrative or descriptive), (2) their corresponding category/class as found in (2) CIDOC-CRM and in (3) EDM. The author is using this correspondence frame for creating a CIDOC-CRM-based referent ontology for description of Bulgarian museum artefacts. A detailed model, based on this frame will be created, with terminology thesaurus attached.

Association for the Development of the Information Society, Institute of Mathematics and Informatics Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Plovdiv University "Paisii Hilendarski"