The CIDOC CRM, an Ontological Approach to Schema Heterogeneity

The creation of the World Wide Web has had a profound impact on the ease with which information can be distributed and presented. Now with more and more information becoming available, there is an increasing demand for targeted global search, comparative studies, data transfer and data migration between heterogeneous sources of cultural and scholarly contents. This requires interoperability not only at the encoding level a task solved well by XML for instance but also at the more complex semantics level, where lie the characteristics of the domain. In the meanwhile, the reality of semantic interoperability is getting frustrating. In the cultural area alone, dozens of “standard” and hundreds of proprietary metadata and data structures exist, as well as hundreds of terminology systems. Core systems like the Dublin Core represent a common denominator by far too small to fulfil advanced requirements. Overstretching its already limited semantics in order to capture complex contents leads to further loss of meaning[1].