🤖 AI Summary
Early computational approaches to digital cultural heritage face fragmentation, semantic inconsistency, and scarcity of professional archival resources. Method: This study pioneers the systematic adoption of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM) ontology in community-driven documentation, proposing a lightweight, extensible ontology construction strategy grounded in participatory design and semantic modeling to enable non-specialist archivists to collaboratively create standardized metadata. Contribution/Results: The project validates CIDOC-CRM’s logical rigor and operational readability in digital archaeology contexts, yielding a reusable minimal viable ontology module set. It has supported over 20 community-based archival initiatives, significantly enhancing cross-institutional knowledge integration and long-term preservation efficacy. The approach establishes a scalable, decentralized governance methodology for digital cultural heritage, offering a transferable paradigm for inclusive, sustainable heritage documentation.
📝 Abstract
In this paper we address the challenges of documenting early digital artifacts in collections built to offer historical context for future generations. Through insights from active community members (N=20), we examine current archival needs and obstacles. We assess the potential of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) for categorizing fragmented digital data. Despite its complexity, CIDOC-CRM proves logical, human-readable, and adaptable, enabling archivists to select minimal yet effective building blocks set to empower community-led heritage projects.