From 26 to 30 May 2014, PIN hosted in Prato the Summer School “Mapping existing datasets to CIDOC CRM”, as part of the ARIADNE Transnational Access (TNA) activities.

Summer_school

Martin Doerr of ICS-Forth Explains CIDOC-CRM

The main goal of the school was to enable scholars and professionals to implement conceptual mappings and data conversions of their existing datasets to the CIDOC CRM ontology.

Participants from France, Austria and UK attended the school by proposing their case studies and research projects and by learning how to transform their datasets in a CIDOC CRM compatible format for enhancing integration and for raising a wide interoperability among different archives.

Specialists coming from Greece, Cyprus and Italy, with an extensive expertise in the field of semantics and ontologies, provided a broad overview of the CIDOC CRM and a large number of examples of real applications of this ontology in different fields, including archaeology, philology, bibliography and the encoding of geospatial information.

Two of the five days were entirely dedicated to practical exercises, focused on the implementation of the mappings for the case studies proposed by students and carried out under the supervision of the specialists. A specific set of tools, including an updated version of the CIDOC CRM Mapping Tool developed at FORTH, was also provided to the students in order to simplify the conceptual understanding of the various mapping matches and to speed up the mapping operations. They will use the same tools in their future activity, also beyond the specific purposes of the summer school, to extend their mappings for their interoperability needs.

The fruitful cooperation has brought benefits to all participants, providing the specialists with new issues and scenarios to be used as a starting point for future developments of the ontology, and the students with new and efficient tools to facilitate the continuation of their research.

Overall, the school has been a success and there have been very positive feedback from the students.

A photo gallery of the event is provided through our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/pin.vastlab/posts/410994019043112?notif_t=like