While we are still working on assembling the full RELEVEN team (in fact, we are hiring now!) it hasn’t stopped us from getting down to work. On Friday 25 June we had a meeting – yes, in person! – of the RELEVEN data modelers together with interested colleagues from the wider Digital Humanities group, to start hashing out what vocabularies and ontologies might fit the needs of our STAR model. Carla came prepared with an entire design sketch of an idea as a basis for discussion that combines the PROV Ontology with OAI:ORE proxy logic, inspired by the Europeana data model, to express our assertions. 

OAI:ORE was particularly interesting, since it is designed to describe aggregated, distributed web resources consisting of different media (including text, images, data, video etc). This makes it particularly useful for use with collections of rich data, potentially drawn from different sources and even possibly saying completely different things about the entities in question.

There are still a lot of questions remaining, of course – what constitutes an authority vs. a source? When and how should we record acts of interpretation that come from reading texts, and specifically who performed those acts? Can this be done without an infinitely recursive meta-model of assertions about assertions? Stay tuned…