I’ve loaded the CIDOC-CRM vocabulary and it certainly seems to cover a lot of what we need, but some things are still problematic.
It would be possible to make an Item in Omeka for a statue (for example) which would be classed as E22 Human-Made Object. One could attach properties to the item to describe what it consists of in terms of materials (P45 “consists of” with range E57 Material).
One could either give the material information as a literal string (e.g. “bronze”) or we could have further Omeka Items of class E57 Material for “bronze” and any other materials we need. You would then link from the statue item to the bronze item via the P45 “consists of” property.
That is all OK, and I can see many advantages to being able to retrieve materials as items, and see bronze objects linked from the Item for bronze.
But CIDOC-CRM regards the Production of an object as a class in its own right also. I do not really want to have to have another Omeka Item of class E12 Production just to be able to attach properties for who produced the item, where it was produced, and at what time period it was produced. I would prefer to be able to attach a “place of production” direct to the object, and a creator (or creators), potentially with roles. But CIDOC-CRM would expect an object of class E39 Actor to be linked to the E12 Production via property P14 “carried out by” to signify that the production of the object was carried out by a certain person.
So theoretically that is all very good, but what makes sense for using Omeka?
As it happens, I am not wanting to build these items in Omeka manually, as we have the data in another system and will be synchronising it across into Omeka via the API. So there’s no particular problem in creating an item of class Production to be linked to each object (though it might be tricky making a single Production object to link to several objects which were produced together).
My main problem comes with what the search and display interface would then be like for the user. I don’t want them to be retrieving in results a load of Production class items. I want them to retrieve the actual museum objects, and for the display of a museum object to include all the details of the production as part of the web page.
Is there any way to achieve that while staying with the CIDOC-CRM vocabulary and not departing from the standard?
I did wonder about value annotation. Suppose you have the object as an Omeka Item of class E22 Human-Made Object, then you could add a property P14 “carried out by” and thereby link to an Actor. (Property P14 is meant to have a domain of E7 Activity, so should not really be attached to a Human-Made Object.) But then you could use the value annotation and somehow indicate that the context of the “carried out by” was the Production of the object. I’m not happy with this approach because of the clash of domain, and it still would not display in a natural way without some more programming.
Another thing I wondered is whether the Production of the item would need to appear in Omeka a bit like the Mapping of an item or the Media, as a separate tab? But I do not know how you would achieve that: it would probably need a module writing.
Pointers to any people who are using CIDOC-CRM or another vocabulary for museum objects would be helpful!