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TWG OMDS-OO
Development of a common N4O Objects Ontology (N4O OO) and a Minimal Metadata-Set (N4O MMDS)
About this assembly
The primary goal is to develop an N4O Object Ontology (N4O OO) for the Knowledge Graph1, which is being developed primarily by the VZG in Task Area 5, supported by the NFDI4Objects. Its content is being coordinated in close cooperation with the (humanities and cultural studies) MoU group in order to establish interoperability in the humanities and cultural studies. Other neighboring consortia, such as NFDI4Earth, NFDI4Biodiversity, etc., will also be included to cover the natural science aspects. The ontology is based on and builds on a minimal metadata set (N4O MMDS). The N4O derivative of the NFDIcore ontology ends with a digital resource, e.g. nfdi:Dataset or nfdi:SemanticExpressivity, where the N4O OO docks. All these steps are carried out through a joint discussion with the task areas, corresponding TWGs and community clusters.
The N4O MMDS is primarily determined by the specialist work program - and thus the object cycle - of Task Areas 1-4 “Documentation”, ‘Collecting’, “Analysis & Experiments” and “Protecting” and touches on the subject areas of excavation, (digital) reconstruction and annotation, collection, art history, restoration/conservation, scientific analyses, heritage conservation, provenance research, etc.
This TWG therefore also defines which elements/attributes the N4O minimal metadata set contains, i.e. which information is absolutely necessary to describe object data on its way through the object cycle. This includes the digital steps: capture, qualify, analyze, share and interlink. The N4O minimal metadata set is only provided in a technical description (e.g. JSON) and must be transformed into various “dialects”, e.g. LIDO/XML, for the individual data exchange of heterogeneous systems. The N4O Minimal Metadata Set (N4O MMDS) and the N4O Objects Ontology (N4O OO) as its RDF representation (based on CIDOC-CRM, schema.org, PROV-O, SKOS, BFO) map the object cycle, which is successively enriched with information through the task areas with the tasks of documenting, collecting, analyzing and protecting. These structures are used because the data flow in the Knowledge Graph provides for LIDO/XML and RDF.
Related documents
Reference: N4O-ASSE-2025-06-7