Target Model Specification (v.2.1)

Appendix C - Identity

As stated in the Identity Patterns section, CHIN has decided to use a simple E55_Type pattern to identify gender and cultural affiliation whilst E74_Group will be used to identify nationality, nationhood and community. The E55_Type class will be used in conjunction with it to render what the type of the group is. The following patterns have been rejected for reasons explained below.

With E5_Event

Identity fields could be represented using an event in the following way:

083_Pattern_IdentityWithEvent_p

However, both E5_Event and E7_Activity definitions establish that a performance has to occur on the part of the actor for them to apply. Neither gender nor community or nationality are performed so that handling these concepts as either E5_Event or E7_Activity would not be in semantic conformity to CIDOC CRM’s guidelines. This option has thus been dismissed.

With Bio CRM

Bio CRM proposes another way to render genders and nationalities by linking a bioc:Actor with a bioc:Actor_Role that is neither an E5_Event nor an E39_Actor, but a subclass of E1_CRM_Entity. However, this is not satisfactory as this new class cannot be dated without a bioc:Event that functions just as the CIDOC CRM E5_Event. This, for the same reasons as with the E5_Event, this pattern has been disqualified.

With ore:Aggregation

In their discussions about gender and nationality the linked.art project has suggested to use the OAI-ORE Specifications (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/datamodel), an approach that is similar to CIDOC CRM’s E74_Group but is composed of aggregated resources.

The ORE ontology is composed of four classes: ore:Aggregation, ore:AggregatedResource, ore:ResourceMap and ore:Proxy.

  • The ore:Aggregation class is a set of other resources. “They are more conceptual groupings, rather than physical ones” (https://linked.art/model/collection/#aggregations)
  • The ore:AggregatedResource class is a resource that is a constituent of an aggregation
  • The ore:ResourceMap class is a resource with information consisting of assertions that describe a single aggregation, enumerate the constituent aggregated resources, and may include additional properties about the aggregation and aggregated resources. It must have a minimal number of metadata, at least dcterms:creator and dcterms:modified. The ore:ResourceMap seems mandatory, but neither linked.art (https://linked.art/model/collection/) nor Europeana (https://pro.europeana.eu/resources/apis/intro) use an ore:ResourceMap in their model.
  • The ore:Proxy is a class that links the ore:AggregatedResource and the ore:Aggregation to qualify the ore:AggregatedResource in the context of the aggregation. For example, ore:Proxy is used to express sequencing between ore:AggregatedResource in an ore:Aggregation since “without any sequencing information, the order of Aggregated Resources cannot be inferred — they form an unordered set. It would not be legitimate for the Resource Map to express this sequencing by asserting a triple of the sort <AR-1> <hasNext> <AR-2>, since this fact is only true in the context of the specific Aggregation, and is not a “global” fact” (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/datamodel#Proxy).

084_Pattern_IdentityWithOreAggregation_p

This ontology would therefore be appropriate to render the complexity of gender identification and nationalities, but would significantly complicate the Target Model. In addition it would rely on semantics that would be inconsistent with those of CIDOC CRM, rendering this part of the model problematic in the long term. Finally, it is not possible to express the period when the entity is part of the aggregation, so this would not be useful either. As a result, this approach has been dismissed.

💬 Discussion:
  George Bruseker (18:11 16 Jul): This seems like a very technical solution that provides semantics that are inconsistent with the rest of CRM.

George Bruseker (18:13 16 Jul): I would suggest that if you need to tackle this topic in the future that there is a strong argument for a new event class for ‘identification’ of some sort. There are of course a lot of potential debates in this area and some dangerous territory around nature or nurture. That being said there is an element of declarativeness about gender, regardless of its biological status. It is something that people state (otherwise we could not know). If this argument holds water then one could track statements of identification in order to see how gender/sexuality evolves for individuals over time.

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