SNAP:DRGN & CIDOC-CRM conversation
Friday, May 15, 2015: King’s College London

We have three main topics of discussion:

1. personal relationships (the SNAP “bond” ontology);
2. co-references (and the inferences that derive from them);
3. SNAP use of ontologies, and mapping to CRM.

1. Personal relationships/bonds

• CEO: The CRM defines several types of relationship (e.g. event, group, unilateral, family)
• GB: SNAP will eventually need to cover many more than just family/household relationships, as we currently have in the ontology
• OE: Is the aim to map all SNAP relationships to the CRM ontology, so we can always represent SNAP in CRM?
• FL: gave a summary of snap ontology
  • (digression on equivalences between [lawd|crm|foaf|snap|etc.]:Person; is this a union set, rather than a single overlapping definition?)
  • dual-classes of relationships: serious/casual/legally recognized; social contracts; intimate; household; foster/adopted/inlaw/claimed;
  • gender (and other assumptions) not modelled in top-level classes, but could (maybe should) be?
  • CEO: we can model all of these with group relationships, and then type them. Maybe we should make a recommendation for extending CRM with SNAP classes?
  • GB: can we model non-family relationships (at the top-level)?
    • [Not currently.]
  • CEO: We should probably leave events out of the typology for now.
  • VV: How can “ContractualRelationship” and “Relationship” be siblings?
    • (GB: rename “Rel” ~~> “QualifierRel”)
  • GB: then let’s just list all the new non-family relationships we need, and worry about grouping them (or not) later.
• OE: Suggest a follow-up meeting on CRM-INF (with Steve Stead, Dominic Oldman and Hugh Cayless).
• PR: BBC programmes ontology defines relationships by membership to groups
  • could build on snap bonds for new relationships; useful for scholarly/journalistic claims, inference etc.

2. Co-references–both unambiguous and suggested (and inference)

• OE: distinguishing explicit and implicit co-reference:
  • implicit co-reference is what all scholarly systems do, x=y.
  • explicit co-reference requires attributing statement to someone
  • a negative co-reference has no common target
  • do co-references need a target?
  • CEO: CRM doesn’t model identity, per se; two entities with different ids are therefore two different entities. CRM can’t express conflicting/untrue information.
  • AC: it’s the expressing of conflicting opinions that is the problem there, if you want to keep both.
  • HW: is identity a combination of person and context?
    • CEO: They have different identifiers/are in different data-spaces.
  • OE: SNAP needs to make explicit co-reference statements (with “belief system” over the top). Do we want fuzzy reliability values on them? (GB: no!)

3. SNAP ontology(ies)

• AC: lawd:hasAttestation/hasCitation == crm:isReferredToBy ?
• AC: lawd:nameAttestation == crm:appellation ?
• AC: CRM-inf might be more useful for Scenario 3 (unambiguous and unproblematic co-reference) than Scenario 4 (scholarly commentary about co-references/relationship), because CRM is a bit deterministic.