Dear Patrick, among the other things you can consider the ontological model CIDOC-CRM, if you haven't done so already. It deals with a different perspective (one you are actually already considering) focused on material objects; it may be useful to reflect upon how to express provenance and life of a charter as a physical object intimately related to the archive/collection/library that hosts or has hosted it. See you all in Munich, Arianna Patrick Sahle wrote:
Lieber Georg,
In my basic model I will regard (implicitly) the underlying concepts of at least the TEI-Header, the Dublin Core Abstract Model and FRBR, although none of these will completely fill the bill.
Are there any further suggestions as to which other conceptual approaches I may take into account? I know you are aware of it - but I have to stress a bit on another model that we definitively have to take into account: The Vocabulaire internationale de diplomatique.
I will consider that too. But that is more about the border between charters and non-charters and less about der information characteristics of a charter. I don't have a strong position in defining what a charter is. We could set up a centralized definition or even leave it to the local views (constructivism: if somebody says it's a charter, then it is a charter). Or a position in between: you may call it a charter but it doesn't fit into our model, so we are not interested in this particular object ...
TEI, DC and FRBR (i.e.: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) are models for printed material (FRBR), generic texts (TEI) and documents (DC)
I know. You're perfectly right. That's why I said none of thme fills the bill completely. The FRBR-distinction between abstract and concrete entities is helpful, but it is derived from printed works. TEI sticks to an abstract notion of text on one hand and structures of printed material on the other. DC is interesting for combining simplicity with a nice theoretical model but doesn't really helps in defining what the object really is.
- and we are scholars of diplomatics (employed in archives, universities, libraries). We can learn from them - but we do need something that comes from our understanding what charters are ("historical texts with at least one physical representation on which its legal validity was based" - can anybody native speaking help me with this definition? :-). And you see: all three models you cited aren't really interested in the authenticity of a document. A scholar of diplomatics is ("discrimen veri ac falsi" ...). Thus also the models Luciana is talking of (MoReq e.g.) are of interest, I think.
Thanks for the hint on MoReq!
To outline my model a little bit further: A charter (as it's digital representation) is a complex object (I would like to avoid splitting it up into several simple objects). To describe it we need data on different ontological entities in that complex object. To give an example: - the charter is an abstract thing (like the "work" in FRBR) - it has an issue date, an issuer, an issue place etc. - the charter might be a material thing (or may have more than one material manifestations) - with format, support, and a reference to an archive or achival holding etc. - there may be - for example - a date differing from the issue date of the abstract thing - the charter might have one or several forms of further representation - like in an edition - or a photograph - or a "regestum" - and all of these have further attributes (publishing date for example) - and then you have digital forms of these thing - yet with other attributes
Of course, you could split up these things to obtain clear 1:n-relationships (one abstract charter, several manifestations; one entry in a cartulaire, several editions/regests/facsimiles). But that would make things more complicated than is necessary. In the real world, we are talking about digital metadata, so we have already a compound object which talks about the different ontological entities. We only have to keep things clear then. Some external references we cannot avoid: 1. something is part of something else which forms another object: the charter (as an printed edition) is part of a larger edition; is part of a cartulaire, is part of a digitization project etc. (collection level description) 2. Identification of something which has to be described as another object - this photo is about the same charter manifestation as that digitized print edition (this is some kind of normalization on the abstract text level) - this issuer is Person X (reference on authority files)
With number 2 we are already in the future. For now I would like to have a model as simple as possible to make a general charter portal realizable. That's at least my starting point ...
Comments?
Best, Patrick
-- Dr Arianna Ciula Research Associate Centre for Computing in the Humanities King's College London Strand London WC2R 2LS (UK) Tel: +44 (0)20 78481945 http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cch