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| Mohamed Amer, MA, Global cultures, Bologna University, 2019 |
There is no doubt that the first step in decolonizing any cultural heritage object is to re-document it in a way that is appropriate to its historical context. Consequently, digital documentation has a significant role in the decolonization process, since historical contexts can be rewritten better during digital documentation. Hence, it comes the vital role of Linked Open Data in recontextualizing the history of heritage belongings by using cultural heritage management software, which is based on LOD.
Since culture by nature is a cross border and interlinked, the value of Linked Open Data is very high and also very challenging. Rosetta Stone was a key to deciphering the ancient Egyptian civilization by linking the three writings Ancient Egyptian language, Demotic, and Ancient Greek to each other. Linked Open Data can perform the same function as it connects the different resources, representations, and perspectives for the same history. Linked Open Data, in turn, can provide a link between the colonial and the indigenous point of view. Since the leading resources for the knowledge are Libraries, museums, and archives, Linked Open Data plays a crucial element in integrating the data among these actors and also among any cultural institutions. The above situation demonstrates the challenge that valorizes the Linked Open Data in the Cultural Heritage domain. In this regard, an active Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LODLAM’z) community has emerged since 2011. LODLAM aims to be a central hub for sharing resources and connecting and collaborating with other interested individuals.
The problems:
The problems that challenge any digital research or project are rooted in the data structure, authenticity, diversified resources, and bias. To find the best solutions for this dilemma, we have to start from the very beginning stage. This stage concerns the documentation of the objects and collections. Thus, all the rest will depend on the documentation and cataloging information. It is very crucial here to mention that the decolonization starts alongside with the very early stage of documentation and cataloging the objects. At the time of its excavation and also while and before joining the museum or any cultural institution.
For this purpose, we can categorize the problems that related to the cultural heritage data as follow:
Cultural diversity and data standards:
- Cultural information is more than a domain.
- Collection description “art, archaeology, natural history.”
- Archives and literature “record, treatise, letters..”
- Administration, preservation, conservation of material heritage
- Science and scholarship, investigation, interpretation.
- Presentation, exhibition making, teaching, publication.
- How to make documentation standards?
- Each aspect needs its methods, forms, communication means.
- Data overlap.
- Understanding lives from relationships and expressing these relationships.
In a present world marked by globalization and digitalization, the process of documentation and study of the collections inside the historical institutions, especially in the museums, has to be changed. The traditional model of museum cataloging may challenge some facts such as the cultural bias and historical situatedness of museum cataloging, and the different interpretations of a particular object’s knowledge. The most crucial point is the absence of the voices of the indigenous people or the lack of decolonial views.
When describing an object, there are two kinds of information are usually captured:
- The physical information “Material, inscriptions, dimension, etc.”
- The information regarding the life and scientific understanding of the object and its context. For example, which culture this object belongs to, How it has been used and by whom, how it is acquired, by whom, what it is history, and its cultural significance.
The second type of information is the most crucial part. As it shows the object from a cultural context and this, it is a must for the context and the representation to be free from any biases or colonial aspects. To represent the collections in the decolonized framework.
The Proposed Solution
Using an international standard Model, which is the CIDOC conceptual reference model, “CRM” is a theoretical and practical tool that aims to explore the complexities of our past through the integration of the complex and dispersed datasets. It was designed for the inclusion of data in the field of cultural heritage. CIDOC CRM depends on the formal ontologies, which provides definitions of legal structures to describe the cultural concepts that allow data integration from different resources in software. CIDOC CRM was developed to maintain the shared understanding of the information belongs to the cultural heritage through a common semantic framework. It could represent the semantic glue that mediates between museums, libraries, and archives, considering them as the leading resources for cultural heritage knowledge.
The most significant integrated extension in CIDOC CRM are:
FRBROO: This is a formal ontology for integrating the semantics of the bibliographic information with museum information.
CRMSCI: which is an ontology for integrating the metadata of scientific ploservation, empirical science with others in research, IT environment, and research data libraries.
CRM Archaeo: This encodes the metadata of archaeological examination processes.
Through CIDOC CRM, the cultural heritage date is transformed from catalogs into a high-level community resource, which makes the cultural institutions active and important actors in the revolutionary digital research community. The most significant feature of CIDOC CRM is that it does not concern itself with the differences in terminology between institutions. Still, it supports adding local terminologies by providing an ontological framework among the compared and linked vocabularies.
CIDOC CRM consists of a set of entity types “Real-world things,” which could be connected by using the relationships “properties.” Computerized reasoning could be generated using the connections if they are used correctly with correct entity types. These entities and links concerning the cultural heritage domain are already embedded in CRM. They have been abstracted from the cultural heritage data models and through sharing information among the experts and the institutions in the field. However, every institution could map their entity. Types and relationships apply their data, and this needs a deep understanding of the kinds in relationships to be used. The two critical features regarding the entities in CRM are :
Persistent: things that have a persistent identity.
Temporal: things that had a phenomenon for a limited time.
The entities in CRM have supertypes and subtypes, which could be represented as superclasses and subclasses. All in all, CRM provides a complete full description for the cultural heritage objects based on semantics, which is entirely different from describing objects by a limited number of standard fields, which is very common in the digital representation.
Case Studies:
The Mexican cultural heritage repository project
It was launched by the Mexican ministry of culture, and it aims to create a data model for the Mexican cultural heritage “MDM” to conduct proper documentation of the cultural heritage using the standard CIDOC CRM as the basis. The project sheds light on reconsidering the process of documentation and representation of cultural heritage objects in the museums, especially the Mexican ones. The project could be considered as the first Mexican cultural semantic data aggregator. The directors of the project started by selecting some cultural institutions such as cultural museums from Mexico, training their staff on using the methods of documenting the cultural heritage objects using the Mexican cultural heritage data model “MDM” and developing a set of lists for terminological control. The ministry of culture adopted this project as they affirmed that, even though information technology has emerged in the field of cultural heritage, it is still rare to find catalogs, annotations, or databases adequately described. And that is why they used the Linked Open Data and semantics methodologies as a way to find the most appropriate solutions for this issue. By using these methods, they could assure the integration of data and the cultural information in a continuous data flow among the other cultural sectors in Mexico. The main objective of the project is to be an information aggregator and structural data harvester from the sources of different cultural organizations that are under the management of the ministry of culture. The Documentation process had to be implemented under international standards and guidelines because of the heterogeneous nature and uneven quality of the collected data.
It was necessary to adopt CIDOC CRM as a data model for MDM implement to build the digital repository attempt. The model is designed to describe cultural objects in the most accurate way with providing the exhaustiveness and quality standards. The use of CIDOC CRM allows the team to create a basic framework with enriching it by the integration between the data that entered locally and the data extracted from other semantic vocabularies.
The main classes of MDM model are:
- Data: for describing the periods
- Dimension: for describing the physical details
- Places: for referring the entities related to the description of physical locations.
- Temporal Entity: referring to the time-limited existence entities such as events and activities
- Persistent Entity: referring to the persistent identity through time
Example of a cultural object description using the MDM.
The hierarchy of MDM consists of superclasses and subclasses. In some cases, there could be more than one superclass, which makes the museographer to choose the most relevant superclass of the objects based on the semantics. This could be a complicated process of selection. MDM directors tried to simplify the class hierarchy as much as possible. So they used just one superclass for each MDM class.
To describe the objects in the most accurate way, MDM considers the events and activities as the main descriptive elements of the model. This approach makes the description process based on the result of a particular process or action that demonstrates the change of the description of a specific object through its life cycle.
The detailed caption of the element “Typology” and its main attributes
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