Modelling occurrences in cultural documentation

CLIO , developped by ICS-FORTH, is a system for cultural documentation purposes of museums. It serves as a scientific catalogue of museum artifacts, as opposed to the basic documentation and administrative purposes served by usual collections management systems. It supports artifact descriptions as temporal, geographical, cultural, historical contexts; style, technique, usage, and physical data information. It allows to express certain and uncertain knowledge as well as opinions. In this paper we address the notions of existence, events and causality, referring to them collectively as notions of occurrence, within a conceptual modelling framework and in the context of developing a general ontology for cultural documentation. Particular attention is given to the representation of relations on which historical and other inferences can be based. We present a new approach, which takes mutual dependencies between time and space into account.