=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2119/paper10
|storemode=property
|title=Bio CRM: A Data Model for Representing Biographical Data for Prosopographical Research
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2119/paper10.pdf
|volume=Vol-2119
|authors=Jouni Tuominen,Eero Hyvönen,Petri Leskinen
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/bd/TuominenHL17
}}
==Bio CRM: A Data Model for Representing Biographical Data for Prosopographical Research==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2119/paper10.pdf
Bio CRM: A Data Model for Representing Biographical Data for
Prosopographical Research
Jouni Tuominen1,2 , Eero Hyvönen1,2 , and Petri Leskinen1
1
Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo), Aalto University, Finland and
2
HELDIG – Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki, Finland
http://seco.cs.aalto.fi, http://heldig.fi
firstname.lastname@aalto.fi
Abstract
Biographies make a promising application case of Linked Data: they can be used, e.g., as a basis for Digital Humanities research in
prosopography and as a key data and linking resource in semantic Cultural Heritage (CH) portals. In both use cases, a semantic data
model for harmonizing and interlinking heterogeneous data from different sources is needed. This paper presents such a data model,
Bio CRM, with the following key ideas: 1) The model is a domain specific extension of CIDOC CRM, making it applicable to not only
biographical data but to other CH data, too. 2) The model makes a distinction between enduring unary roles of actors, their enduring
binary relationships, and perduing events, where the participants can take different roles modeled as a role concept hierarchy. 3) The
model can be used as a basis for semantic data validation and enrichment by reasoning. 4) The enriched data conforming to Bio CRM is
targeted to be used by SPARQL queries in a flexible ways using a hierarchy of roles in which participants can be involved in events.
Keywords: Linked Data, Data models, Biographical representation, Event-based modeling, Role-centric modeling, Prosopogra-
phy
1. Event-based Approach for Biographies relations and roles (Kozaki et al., 2006) occur in time and
The underlying idea of this paper is to represent life sto- space, too. For example: Are family relationships events,
ries of people as Linked Data, extracted and aggregated e.g., being the father of or being married to someone? Are
from heterogenous distributed data sources, such as dictio- professions events, such as being a president of a country,
naries of national biographies, museum collections, library because holding an office occurs in time and space with an
databases, Wikipedia etc. (Hyvönen et al., 2018). Linked agent involved?
biographical data facilitates studying enriched individual For example, the concept of “bishop” would be useful in
life stories in biography research (Roberts, 2002) as well as representing and querying biographical data, but what does
in prosopography research on groups of people (Verboven being a bishop actually mean? Is there a class and in-
et al., 2007; Keats-Rohan, 2007). This paper addresses stances of bishops, is being a bishop a property of a per-
the fundamental technical research question that has to be son or a role, or how does the concept relate to the event
solved in this kind of work: how to model life stories, so of holding a bishop’s office? Obviously, being a bishop
that they can be enriched from heterogeneous data sources can be represented in different ways, but then harmonizing
and interlinked with each other in a semantically interop- and querying of data about bishops becomes very difficult
erable way? since the user cannot be sure in what alternative ways be-
Our research hypothesis is that a good choice for data ing a bishop is actually represented. On the other hand,
modeling and harmonization is the event-based approach we clearly need foundational ontological structures (Guar-
where a person’s life is seen as a sequence of spatiotempo- ino and Welty, 2002) for representing pieces of heteroge-
ral, interlinked events from birth to death—a person may neous knowledge in a systematic and unique way, but on
also be involved in prenatal and posthumous events. For the other hand, there is a need for simple conceptualizations
example, metadata about a painting in a gallery actually and property structures for querying the data and represent-
means that there has been a painting event, and this could ing the data for the human user.
be included in the timeline of the artist’s semantic biog- To address these problems, this paper introduces a data
raphy. Event-based modeling and ontologies have already model, Bio CRM, for harmonizing, enriching, and using bi-
been found useful for harmonizing heterogeneous cultural ographical linked data based on events. Bio CRM is an ex-
heritage data. A most notable and widely used ontol- tension of CIDOC CRM to the biographical domain. This
ogy for this is the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model ISO standard was selected as the basis because it is the most
(CRM)1 (Doerr, 2009), but there are also other models (Rai- widely used ontology standard for event-based modeling
mond and Abdallah, 2007; Scherp et al., 2009; Shaw, 2010; in museums and has been integrated with the Functional
van Hage et al., 2011). Requirements for Bibliographic Record (FRBR) family of
modeling standards in libraries2 . Data from museums and
A recurring problem in event based modeling is, however,
libraries are essential in describing life stories.
that it is not necessarily clear what is an event, since many
2
https://www.ifla.org/
1
http://cidoc-crm.org about-the-frbr-review-group
59
In the following, major use cases for Bio CRM in biograph- the event type. Bio CRM extends CIDOC CRM by intro-
ical and prosopographical research are first listed. After ducing role-centric modeling. The reason for the extension
this, the design principles and the actual data model are pre- is that while CIDOC CRM does include a mechanism for
sented, with three online applications illustrating the use of representing roles of participants in events, its encoding in
the system. Finally, related work is discussed with a com- RDF is complex and still in experimental phase (see Sec-
parison of Bio CRM with other data models. tion 5 for further discussion).
Bio CRM provides the general data model for biographi-
2. Prosopographical Method cal datasets. The individual datasets concerning different
The aim of using the Bio CRM data model in our case cultures, time periods, or collected by different researchers
studies is to facilitate using the prosopographical research may introduce extensions for defining additional event and
method (Verboven et al., 2007, p. 47) that consists of two role types. The Linked Data approach enables connecting
major steps. First, a target population of people is selected the biographies to contextualizing information, such as the
that share desired characteristics for solving the research space and time of biographical events, related people, his-
question at hand. For example, our research question may torical events, publications, and paintings.
be related to social networks of men who were born in Fin- The core design principles of the data model are:
land 1800–1900 and were artists. Second, the target group
• The model is a domain specific extension of CIDOC
is analyzed further, and compared with other groups, in or-
CRM, making it applicable to not only biographical
der to solve the research question.
data but to other Cultural Heritage (CH) data, too.
1. Determine target groups Target groups can be found
by data filtering with a human in the loop. For example, • The model makes a distinction between enduring
SPARQL SELECT can be used to create a tabular set of se- unary roles of actors, their enduring binary relation-
lected instances. In our case, faceted search is a promising ships, and perduing events, where the participants can
option for filtering out target groups in a flexible and dy- take different roles modeled as a role concept hierar-
namic way. An interesting possibility for further research chy.
would be to try to do filtering automatically using knowl-
edge discovery. • The model can be used as a basis for semantic data
Once a target group has been determined, specific working validation and enrichment by reasoning.
hypotheses and specific historical questions concerning the
• The enriched data conforming to Bio CRM is targeted
group can be formulated and analyses performed.
to be used by SPARQL queries in a flexible ways us-
2. Prosopographical analysis Linked data and SPARQL
ing a hierarchy of roles in which participants can be
querying provides many possibilities for analyzing target
involved in events.
group data. For example, it is possible to analyze the struc-
ture and changing composition of the group in time and the Bio CRM makes a clear distinction between person’s at-
changing roles of individuals or subgroups. In this case the tributes, relations between people, and events in which peo-
result of a SPARQL SELECT or CONSTRUCT is analyzed ple participate in different roles.
further by specific algorithms or visualization tools, such as
information graphics. • Attributes are properties of a person that are assumed
Another option is to employ methods of network analysis to characterize her independently of time and space.
methods and tools (Easley and Kleinberg, 2010; Hanneman For example, place and time of birth can be modeled
and Riddle, 2005) and visualizations (Dadzie and Rowe, as attributes.
2011; Kehrer and Hauser, 2013). In this case, for example,
a SPARQL CONSTRUCT can be used for creating an RDF • Relations are established between people and are as-
network based on the underlying data. sumed to characterize them independently of time and
space. For example, father-of is such a relation. Re-
3. Representing Biographies as Linked Data lations can, however, have time and space as quali-
fiers, e.g., student-of. For example, Ferdinand Bol
To aggregate, enrich, and link biographical data with re-
(1616–1680) was a student of Rembrandt in 1630–
lated datasets the data must be made semantically interop-
1641, starting his own studio in 1641, but can be char-
erable, either by data alignments (using, e.g., Dublin Core
acterized as a student-of Rembrandt in general. His
and the dumb-down principle) or by data transformations
years in Rembrandt’s studio as a student can be repre-
into a harmonized form (Hyvönen, 2012). In our case we
sented as an event (see below), if needed.
selected the data harmonization approach and the event-
centric CIDOC CRM ISO standard as the ontological basis, • Events take place in time and space and involve partic-
since biographies are based on life events. CIDOC CRM ipants in different roles, expressing the ways in which
provides a common and extensible semantic framework for persons participate in events. For example, an officiant
representing cultural heritage information, operating as a may participate in a certain baptism event.
”semantic glue” for integration, mediation, and interchange
of heterogeneous datasets from, e.g., museums, libraries, The core classes and properties of Bio CRM are presented
and archives. In our work, biographies are modeled as col- in Figure 1. The namespace of the Bio CRM schema is
lections of CIDOC CRM events, where each event is char- http://ldf.fi/schema/bioc/, here used with the
acterized by the 1) actors involved, 2) place, 3) time, and 4) prefix bioc. The full specification of Bio CRM (class and
60
property listing) is available in the namespace URI. Simi- can be qualified with temporal and spatial information by
lary, the prefix cidoc is used for CIDOC CRM’s names- using an event to contextualize the role. A person may
pace http://www.cidoc-crm.org/cidoc-crm/. have been some point a Spouse, a Lawyer in a company,
A central focus in representing biographical data is rep- and a President of a country, possibly several times at dif-
resenting people and their networks. A person is repre- ferent occasions. For example, John Kennedy was Spouse
sented as an instance of bioc:Person, a subclass of of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1953–1963.
cidoc:E21 Person. This instance-of relationship is The binary roles of Bio CRM are divided according the fol-
persistent and never changes during the life of the person. lowing class hierarchy:
In order to identify a person, the person is associated with
core data: appellations, i.e., names and identifiers in other bioc:Binary_Relationship_Role
data repositories, birth time and place, and death time and bioc:Person_Relationship_Role
place, using CIDOC CRM. Person’s birth and death are bioc:Family_Relationship_Role
represented as a Birth/Death event, which can be qualified bioc:Social_Relationship_Role
with time and place. Birth can also incorporate information bioc:Intergroup_Relationship_Role
about the mother and father. bioc:Group_Relationship_Role
In addition to the core data, a person can also have other
attributes, relationships, and participate in events. Having a Similary as for unary roles, the binary role classification
role, say Teacher, may be temporary or something inherent can be extended in individual datasets.
characterizing a person as a whole in all times, even if it is The individual events of biographies are represented
possible also to specify when exactly the role was present as subclasses of bioc:Event that is a subclass of
(e.g., a professorship). Being a Teacher by education is dif- cidoc:E5 Event inheriting its properties. From a se-
ferent from saying that the person happened to participate mantic viewpoint, events are described especially in terms
in a particular teaching event, e.g., gave a lecture, in the of
role of a Teacher.
• the time of the event
Genders, nationalities, and occupations of people are rep-
(cidoc:P4 has time-span),
resented by relating a person to a unary role using the
property bioc:bearer of. Figure 2 depicts an exam- • place of the event (cidoc:P7 took place at),
ple of John F. Kennedy in the role of President. The
role (blank node, as there is no need to give a iden- • actors that participated in it
tity to it in this case) is attached to the a Person us- (cidoc:P11 had participant),
ing the bioc:has occupation relation (subproperty
of bioc:bearer of). While this expresses the gender, • other resources involved
nationality, or occupation generally, it’s also possible to (cidoc:P12 occurred in the presence of).
qualify the roles in time and and space by attaching a con- Time and place properties refer directly to time spans and
textualizing event, e.g., the employment of a person. This instances of places, respectively. The values for participat-
is useful, as people have different roles during their life ing actors and other resources are instances of role classes.
that typically perdue a shorter period of time and may have An actor role associates an actor with a role, making it pos-
other qualifiers, too. For example, John Kennedy had the sible for a person to participate in events in different roles
role of President in the US in 1961–1963. that can also be qualified in terms of additional properties.
The unary roles of Bio CRM are divided into the following Similarly to actors, physical objects and immaterial things
class hierarchy: can be involved in an event in specific roles.
bioc:Unary_Role Events can be used for qualifying a unary (e.g., an occupa-
bioc:Gender tion) or a binary relation further, i.e., in such cases an in-
bioc:Nationality stance of bioc:Event has to be created. As an example,
bioc:Occupation Figure 4 represents the presidency of John F. Kennedy qual-
ified with time and the country. Another example in Fig-
The role class hierarchy can be further extended in individ- ure 5 depicts the marriage of John F. Kennedy and Jacque-
ual datasets, e.g., by listing the prevalent occupations in a line Kennedy Onassis qualified with time. The individual
certain cultural era. datasets may introduce their own classifications of event
The same role-based pattern is used for representing in- types and associated roles.
herent relationships between people, such as family re- By using roles, it is possible to keep the number of proper-
lations (mother, cousin, aunt, etc.) and social relations ties smaller, because different properties for different roles
(studentOf, knows, etc.). Relationships are represented are not not needed. Instead, different role classes are used.
by relating an actor (a person or group) to another actor Such a model is simpler to query using SPARQL and pro-
in a role by using one of the subproperties of the prop- vides the user with a set of useful and natural hierarchy of
erty bioc:has relation. The role is attached to the role concepts.
another actor with the property bioc:inheres in (in- Possible roles that can be attached to certain
verse property of bioc:bearer of). Figure 3 depicts event types are specified using the OWL re-
an example of John F. Kennedy having a spouse Jacqueline striction owl:AllValuesFrom on property
Kennedy Onassis. Similarly to unary roles, relationships cidoc:P11 had participant. This can be used for
61
Figure 1: The core classes and properties of Bio CRM.
Figure 2: Unary role: John F. Kennedy as a president.
validating data, i.e., to see if the events have participants OPTIONAL {
in incompatible roles. It is recommended that each event ?event cidoc:P11_had_participant ?role ;
rdfs:label ?event_title ;
class, say Baptism, has a corresponding class of allowed cidoc:P4_has_time-span ?time ;
roles, say Baptism Actor Role. Its subclasses are cidoc:P7_took_place_at ?place .
roles whose instances can be used in filling the roles. In }
}
this way, the data annotator can be guided to use only the
correct roles, and the new role class can be used for finding 4. Bio CRM Case Studies
resources in roles when querying. The role hierarchy In the following, three case studies for using Bio CRM are
facilitates sharing roles between events and modifying presented.
their role structure easily by just editing the role hierarchy.
This is more flexible than, e.g., changing property names, 4.1. Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO)
if roles were represented using different properties. Bio CRM was originally developed as a spin-off case
The following SPARQL query is an example for finding study related to the database and web service Early Mod-
all ”bishops” in a dataset. Note that because of the chosen ern Letters Online (EMLO)3 . EMLO is a collaboratively
role modeling approach, the query returns both the bishops populated union catalogue of sixteenth-, seventeenth-,
as unary roles (occupation) and acting bishops in specific and eighteenth-century letters, created by the Cultures of
events (e.g., a confirmation). The namespace prefix decla- Knowledge project4 at the University of Oxford. It brings
rations are omitted from the query for brevity. manuscript, print, and electronic resources together in one
space, increasing access to and awareness of them, and al-
SELECT ?person ?name ?event_title lows disparate and connected correspondences to be cross-
?time ?place
WHERE { searched, combined, analyzed, and visualized.
?role a :Bishop ; In addition to purely epistolary data, EMLO contains
bioc:inheres_in ?person . prosopographical information related to the people in
?person a bioc:Person ;
cidoc:P131_is_identified_by 3
?appellation . http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
?appellation rdfs:label ?name . 4
http://www.culturesofknowledge.org
62
Figure 3: Relationship: John F. Kennedy has a spouse Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Figure 4: Event: qualifying the presidency of John F. Kennedy with time and the country.
the database, modeled as events and social relationships. • :Confirmation – :Officiant,
Events cover activities that the people have participated :Confirmation Candidate, :Religion
in during their lives, such as birth and death, ecclesiastic
and educational activities, creations of works, travels, and 4.2. The register of the high school ”Norssi” alumni
residences. The event metadata includes the event name, Bio CRM has been applied in the study of transforming
type, participants and their roles, time span, location, and printed biographical registers into Linked Data and enrich-
source information. As a pilot Linked Data publication ing their contents using Named Entity Linking. As a con-
of the EMLO database (Tuominen et al., 2018), we have crete case study, we have concentrated on the printed reg-
converted the prosopographical data into RDF format us- ister “Norssit 1867-–1992. Helsingin Norssin matrikkeli”,
ing CIDOC CRM for the event-based modeling and W3C’s a book of 708 pages, containing short bios of over 10 000
PROV model (Lebo et al., 2013) for representing the roles students and teachers of the prominent Finnish high school
of participants in the events. “Norssi”, a training school of the University of Helsinki.
As a next step, we propose to convert the data into a Bio The final application in use5 based on this case study is
CRM representation, and build the event and role hierar- described in more detail in (Hyvönen et al., 2017), and
chies pertaining to the activity types stored in the database. the underlying data model is presented in (Leskinen et al.,
The top levels of the event hierarchy of the EMLO database 2017).
are the following ones:
4.3. Semantic National Biography of Finland
Bio CRM has also been used in creating the first prototype
bioc:Event
demonstrator of the Semantic National Biography of Fin-
:Ecclesiastical_Event
land (Hyvönen et al., 2018), based on a collection of some
:Educational_Event
13 000 short biographies that were transformed into RDF-
:Political_Event
format and enriched using data linking to external datasets.
:Professional_Event
Application of Bio CRM to prosopographical research in
:Social_Status_Change
the Norssi and Semantic National Biography case studies
is described in more detail in (Leskinen et al., 2018).
The class :Ecclesiastical Event can be divided
further into subclasses with attached roles, such as: 5
The application is available at http://www.norssit.
fi/semweb/. Its linked open data is published at the Linked
• :Baptism – :Officiant, :Baptismal Candidate, Data Finland service http://ldf.fi at the SPARQL endpoint
:Godfather, :Godmother, :Religion http://ldf.fi/norssit/sparql.
63
Figure 5: Event: qualifying the family relation between John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis with time. Note
that the roles are depicted in the figure as URI resources instead of blank nodes (see Figure 3) due to space constraints. For
more detailed figure, see https://goo.gl/Ex2Uu2.
5. Discussion, Related Work, and Future Re- era. In the cases of high school ”Norssi” alumni and Se-
search mantic National Biography, Bio CRM is used to model,
e.g., the family relations and titles of the people (e.g., edu-
Bio CRM is to the best of our knowledge the first attempt cation, occupation). The idea of using semantically defined
to extend CIDOC CRM into the domain of biography and linked data for modeling and aggregating biographical and
prosopography with additional subclasses, properties, and related data seems to be a promising approach for biogra-
modeling guidelines. A major benefit of the model is the phy and prosopography. However, more work is needed in
compatibility with cultural heritage data from museums, li- detailing out more precisely the class and property struc-
braries, and archives represented using the same standard tures of the model in the general case—so far new classes
framework ontology. and properties have been introduced based on the particular
From a modeling perspective, this paper presented the idea use cases and the general modeling principles presented in
of making a distinction among attributes, relations, and this paper.
events, where entities participate in different roles in a qual- Biographical data has been studied by genealogists (e.g.,
ified manner, not as entities themselves. The underlying (Event) GEDCOM6 ), CH organizations (e.g., the Getty
rationale for this is to harmonize the knowledge represen- ULAN7 ), and semantic web researchers (e.g., BIO ontol-
tation with fewer categories and at the same time keep the ogy8 ). Semantic web event models include, e.g., Event
model expressive and easy to use by SPARQL queries. If Ontology (Raimond and Abdallah, 2007), LODE ontol-
needed, the model can be extended with transformational ogy (Shaw, 2010), SEM (van Hage et al., 2011), and Event-
rules, by which more expressive and foundational event Model-F9 (Scherp et al., 2009). Also, Bibliographic On-
structures can be transformed into simpler attribute and role tology (BIBO) (D’Arcus and Giasson, 2009) includes a
structures, when needed and appropriate from an applica- model for events. For a more detailed comparison on event
tion perspective, and vice versa. Events are needed for har- models, see (Scherp and Mezaris, 2014). A history ontol-
monizing data for the machine but the human end user of- ogy with map visualizations is presented in (Nagypal et al.,
ten conceptualizes the world in document-centric or other 2005), and an ontology of historical events in (Hyvönen
ways. Thus, additional representations of the same event- et al., 2007). Visualization using historical timelines is
based knowledge may be useful, especially if it is generated discussed, e.g., in (Jensen, 2003), and event extraction re-
automatically by the system. viewed in (Hogenboom et al., 2011).
Our experiences of applying a first version of Bio CRM to PROSO (Zingoni, 2014) is a data model for presenting
the three case studies suggest the the model is usable for prosopographical data records. It has a strong focus on
practical purposes. Though formal evaluation of the model representing the provenance information of the records us-
has not been conducted, the application of Bio CRM to data ing factoids, and uses event-based modeling for stating
originating from different sources, in different formats, and the changes of a person (e.g., receiving a honorary ti-
covering different eras is an indication of the suitability of
the model to act as a general harmonizing model for proso- 6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM
pographical data. In the spirit of design science methodol- 7
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/
ogy, Bio CRM was designed to solve the modeling needs vocabularies/ulan/
of the prosopographical data of the Early Modern Letters 8
http://vocab.org/bio/
Online (EMLO), which provides a rich classification of the 9
https://www.kd.informatik.uni-kiel.de/
events and associated roles of people in the early modern en/research/ontologies/core-ontologies
64
tle). Vocabularies and ontologies for representing personal W3C’s PROV model uses qualified associations to spec-
relationships include the Standards for Networking An- ify the roles of the participants in events. The in-
cient Prosopographies (SNAP) project10 and the Relation- stance of the class prov:Association is attached
ship vocabulary (Davis, 2004). Existing data models that to the role using the property prov:hadRole, to the
support role representation include CIDOC CRM, SEM, agent using the property prov:agent, and to the event
VIVO/BFO, Schema.org, PROV, and the Organization On- using the property prov:qualifiedAssociation.
tology. Thus, the standard CIDOC CRM event can be qualified
CIDOC CRM includes a mechanism for representing the with such an association, but it might be unintuitive for
role of an active participant in an event, modeling it as a the user to represent the qualifier separately from the
property of the property that is used for representing the cidoc:P11 had participant relation. By design,
participating actor (see CIDOC’s P14.1 in the role PROV is meant for representing provenance information
of). There is a proposal for encoding CIDOC’s properties involved in producing a piece of data or thing; all biograph-
of properties as RDF11 , introducing new class for the prop- ical events are not such activities.
erty and auxiliary properties for connecting the event and W3C’s Organization Ontology (Reynolds, 2014) is a
the participant, which adds complexity to the data model. core ontology for describing organizational structures.
The status of the proposal is still experimental. It includes a model for specifying membership roles
Simple Event Model (SEM) is a general model for express- people have in organizations by introducing the class
ing events, with support for three alternative representations org:Membership. Such a membership is associated
for roles, based on using a) rdf:value, b) reification, or with the role using the property org:role, to the agent
c) named graphs. All of the techniques add complexity to with the property org:member, and to the organization
the data model. The model also introduces a new property with the property org:organization. The modeling
sem:roleType, instead of using the standard RDF prop- approach is similar to the W3C’s PROV model, but using
erty rdf:type. different property names.
VIVO Integrated Semantic Framework ontology modules Bio CRM’s property bioc:inheres in is used for rep-
(VIVO-ISF)12 include a model for representing roles in resenting both atemporal (unary roles and binary relation-
events. The model uses the properties of the Basic For- ships without qualifiers) and temporal (qualified by using
mal Ontology (BFO) (Smith et al., 2015) and the re- events) roles of people. This is an informed decision for
lated Relations Ontology (RO)13 , inheres in to at- the simplicity of the model. A different approach has been
tach the role to a person, and realized in to at- chosen in Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) 2.0, where rela-
tach the role to an event (and their inverse properties tions can be represented as continuous or occurrent, with
bearer of and realizes). It should be noted that separate relation types for them (Smith et al., 2015). BFO’s
the inclusion of the properties inheres in/bearer of approach has been criticized for its complexity, that causes
and realizes/is realized in in BFO is unclear in logic and usability issues (Mungall, 2013).
the current version (BFO 2.0)14 . Bio CRM has taken
some inspiration from VIVO, and uses similar properties Acknowledgements
bioc:inheres in and bioc:bearer of, but retains The development of Bio CRM was started in the EU COST
compatibility with CIDOC CRM by using the property project ”Reassembling the Republic of Letters”16 (Tuomi-
cidoc:P11 had participant to attach the role to nen et al., 2018).
the event.
Schema.org15 provides a class schema:Role to rep- 6. References
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