Mapping the hierarchy of EAD to VRA Core 4.0 through CIDOC CRM

Abstract

Metadata interoperability requires the development of mappings and crosswalks between different schemas. Crosswalks development is a laborious and complex task especially when metadata of compound objects include hierarchical structures. A typical case of such a complexity is finding aids that describe archives that include hierarchies of subordinate components. This paper makes a step forward to obtaining interoperability between two well-known metadata schemas, the EAD standard for the encoding of archival descriptions and the VRA Core 4.0 standard for describing compound visual resources. The paper presents an algorithm for mapping archival hierarchical structures expressed in the EAD standard to the VRA Core 4.0 standard. The input of the algorithm can be any EAD document as well as the crosswalk from EAD to VRA Core that has already been defined, by exploiting the mappings of both EAD and VRA Core 4.0 to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. The output of the proposed process is a VRA Core 4.0 document that includes the information of the EAD document and represents its archival structure.