2025 Summer School on CIDOC CRM Interoperability and Applications

Overview

The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM) is an international standard (ISO 21127) developed for the integration, mediation, and interchange of cultural heritage information. It is a formal ontology and a theoretical and practical tool for information integration in the field of cultural heritage. It can help researchers, administrators and the public to explore complex questions with regards to our past across diverse and dispersed datasets. The CIDOC CRM achieves this by providing definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation and of general interest for the querying and exploration of such data. These formal descriptions allow the integration of data from multiple sources in a software and schema agnostic fashion. Also, the wide deployment and use of the CIDOC CRM in recent years have highlighted that cultural information extends to other disciplines as well, such as biology, geology and others. The cultural discourse includes information from all sorts of sciences and products of sciences, such as digital productions, biological samples, specimen of physical objects (materials, fluids etc.). Scientific activities themselves are part of the human culture. The CIDOC CRM has been used in more than 400 projects worldwide up to now.

Target Audience

The school is addressed to everyone involved in or interested in scientific documentation in cultural heritage and digital humanities, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, archaeology, museums, archives, libraries, preservation, and collection management, whether they are researchers and scientists, collection managers, curators, or IT specialists.

Topics

1. Conceptual Modeling and Ontologies
2. CIDOC CRM and family models
3. Interoperability through mappings to CIDOC CRM
4. Data Transformations  for creating CIDOC CRM  Knowledge Graphs
5. Access and Query Services over CIDOC CRM Knowledge Graphs
6. CIDOC CRM and modern AI
7. CIDOC CRM applications

Learning Objectives

The summer school will enable the attendees to

• Understand the principles of conceptual modeling
• Understand the motivation for adopting  a standard like CIDOC CRM
• Understand the main classes and properties of CIDOC CRM and the related family of models
• Get acquainted with various applications (in national and international projects and infrastructures) that are based on CIDOC CRM
• Understand how existing data (from csv files to relational databases) can be transformed to CIDOC CRM-based descriptions
• Be able to use CIDOC CRM to document cultural goods (tangible or intangible)
• Be able to specialize CIDOC CRM to capture particular needs
• Be able to transform existing data to CIDOC CRM
• Understand the suite of possible access services on top of CIDOC CRM Knowledge Graphs
• Understand how AI can automate various tasks related to CIDOC-CRM (from data description up to query formulation)

Detailed Program: TBD

Language: English

Prerequisite: Each attendee should have a laptop for the hands-on sessions

Duration: 5 days x 7 hours/day

Format: Morning session: theory, Afternoon session: hands-on session

Tutors: All tutors have more than 10 years of experience in extending and applying this model in national and international projects and collaborations.

Venue: FORTH

Registration:

Physical attendance: 150 Euro (early registration June 1st, 2025), 300 Euro (late registration)

Lunches and coffees  (for 5 days): 50 Euro

Social dinner: 25 Euro

Student prices: please ask the organizers

Registration site: TBA (limited number of seats for the physical attendance)

Certificates of Attendances: All participants will get a certificate of attendance that will mention the exact number of teaching hours. That will enable students to apply for ECTS from their schools.

Organization: Centre for Cultural Informatics,  FORTH-ICS

School Chairs: Chryssoula Bekiari, Maria Theodoridou, Yannis Tzitzikas