Joe, Mia,
I have to agree with you about documentation. I think that this has been a big problem.
Time spent on the BM mapping has been more about getting the right approach and providing models that can easily be incorporated into other museums but also from the perspective of needing to create applications that operate across different local implementations. We didn't want to release documentation until were happy with the approach - and this has changed over the last year.
The Yale Center for British Art are piloting a draft of the manual and have just used it to complete their CIDOC CRM mapping. Each part of the BM mapping is described separately and in sections that resemble (sort of) SPECTRUM sections. They include museum object examples and also provide a listing in RDF that match the diagrams. I am hoping the manual will also form part of training that we have agreed with the V&A this summer.
The objective of the CRM-SIG is to create a memory of mappings that grows with requirements perhaps leading to some tools. The document will occupy a WIKI (MediaWiki of course!) for which we have asked for a CIDOC-CRM.org sub domain.
I hope that the document will answer a lot of questions and start the ball rolling for further documentation.
Just another point though. We use Index+ from SSL for our data which is a hierarchical database not a relational one. Some years ago our Collection Systems Manager (a PhD in Computer Science, a programmer and a Collections specialist) spent probably 9 months documenting the database in a relational format. We have an A0 diagram of the entities and the table relationships. It is very hard to decipher.
When you look at a CRM mapping of the same data you can follow it without any technical background at all. As a consequence it is far easier for people to develop against and YCBA currently has students developing some demonstration apps (that span Yale and BM data). The data model is included in the documentation as a comparison.
D
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