Paths and shortcuts in an event-oriented ontology

Abstract

The CIDOC CRM is an event-oriented ontology used in cultural heritage documentation. Events are temporal entities that are used as hooks for relating persistent entities. However end-users are relating persistent entities in a direct manner (e.g. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote Bilbo the Hobbit) and skip the path through a temporal entity. Fauconnier and Turner suggest that human conscious thinking tends to compress complex paths into simpler relationships, despite still knowing subconsciously about the complete paths. This paper presents two prototypical approaches yielding compression and decompression to the end-user, shortcuts implementation in Semantic Media Wiki and ontology path features in the WissKI system. Lessons learned yield research perspectives about identification, names, end-user usability, and event pattern heuristics. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.