Revenge of the Silk. Elaborating and using a CIDOC CRM extension: a case study on silk-related artefacts

If you are interested by silk, you would like to access the description of several pieces of textiles, to compare and study them. But it can be difficult to study those that are not preserved in the same museum : they can be described in languages you don’t know, they can be hard to find, and you cannot obtain these results via a single query, and in a single environment.To make it easier to find information on silk-related artefacts, the future SILKNOW online platform proposes to accommodate these digital data from different sources by using a common language, CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model or CIDOC CRM.CIDOC CRM is a core ontology with more specialist extensions. Using a few examples coming from Cultural Heritage Institutions’ catalogs and databases, we present the CRM extension we are currently elaborating for this purpose. We also ask for feedback on a general workflow we are currently designing to help those who are interested in using CIDOC CRM and/or are in need to develop CRM extensions. This workflow using the Ontology Management Environment (OntoME) could be re-used by research projects dealing with the same kind of issues, and wishing to find a solution to widely disseminate digital Cultural Heritage data.