ABSTRACT

The ISO certified ontology of the CIDOC CRM provides the concepts to model archaeological data in their semantic context while the Open Geospatial Consortiums (OGC) defines standards for geographic information. In this paper we present the CRMgeo extension which integrates the CIDOC CRM the with the OGC standard of ‘GeoSPARQL– A Geographic Query Language for RDF Data’ which is based on concepts of the existing OGC standards. To bridge the gap between the two conceptual models CRMgeo differentiates two kinds of place concepts. Phenomenal places that derive their identity through real world objects and the spacetime volumes they occupy and declarative places that have been created through human definitions and may approximate phenomenal places. These place concepts are applied to the practice of referencing places with placenames available in gazetteers and related to the corresponding OGC standard. CRMgeo provides the ontological foundation to integrate CIDOC CRM datasets with GIS data.