On the Choice of Vocabularies for Archival Data

Time and time again researchers are faced with the issue of choosing the most appropriate vocabulary for publishing archival data, particularly in the Semantic Web. Options range from most popular ones, such as schema.org, or more comprehensive ones such as CIDOC-CRM. There are pros and cons in each of them, but no guidelines on how to decide about it. This paper aims at providing some guidance based on an analysis of data at hand but also the requirements of data providers and users. For example, archives often refrain to add much interpretation by providing simple access to categorised documents with simple annotations such as person’s names or location names. Moreover, the archival data as well as its digitized versions may present subtleties, such as is the document original or has it been modified, simplified, copied or translated, which is often omitted. Therefore, depending on how much detailed information is actually accessible, but also what are the requirements of the data providers/users, the data can be”placed” at different levels of content literacy/granularity and provenance. By having a clear understanding of the possibilities and limitations of each level, the choice of one or more vocabularies are down to the one(s) that should provide the necessary expressiveness. Naturally, choosing more than one vocabulary also requires some integration task.