The département de l'Information bibliographique et numérique at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Equipex Biblissima organised a day of training on Monday, 1st December 2014 at the BnF.
The semantic web presents new opportunities for research teams and institutions who create and maintain documentary databases as far as interoperability is concerned, but it is also a source of new challenges for them. Over the years, researchers and professionals working in fields as diverse as archaeology, art history, and written cultural heritage have stored their data in different formats, making interoperability difficult.
Various data models have been designed for use in academic fields and in cultural heritage preservation to allow data exchange and reuse. Three such models will be presented during this training session: EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families), used in the description of contextual elements in archival holdings; CIDOC CRM (International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums, Conceptual Reference Model), used specifically in the field of cultural heritage; and FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), developed in the field of library science. For studies in prosopography, manuscript description and the history of the transmission of texts, and depending on the type of data, these models provide options to structure data, increase the granularity of queries on stored data, and make interoperability with similar databases possible.
This training session aimed to give anyone seeking to create a documentary database (students, library professionals, researchers, etc.) the opportunity to discover the potential of each model and evaluate its relevance for their own projects.