The CIDOC CRM Periodic Table: Documentation You Can Test to Support the Adoption of Scientific Research Ontologies for the Humanities

Abstract

The CIDOC CRM family is not only a schema for museum collections. Its extensions formalise the apparatus through which research knowledge is produced and justified: CRMsci models scientific observation and measurement, CRMdig the provenance of digital processes, CRMinf inference and belief. Together they constitute a schema for research data, and the obstacle to their adoption is documentary rather than theoretical: four normative documents, four code conventions, and eighty-nine typed links crossing document boundaries. This paper presents the CIDOC CRM Periodic Table, a single-page browser rendering 131 classes and 480 property entries from CIDOC CRM 7.1.3, CRMsci 3.2, CRMdig 5.0 and CRMinf 1.2.1 as one navigable surface, with two inference facilities: a one-step triple builder admitting only the class-property combinations licensed by declared domains, ranges and the subclass closure, and a multi-step path finder enumerating property chains between two classes. Because all loaded models are merged into one code-keyed dictionary before the hierarchy closures are computed, both resolve chains that cross model boundaries; we document the addition of CRMsci and the three cross-model tests it made possible, and report preliminary uptake signals from 56 months of analytics, with the reading they support.