/mosa-ontology

A decolonial ontology for heritage.

Primary LanguageHTMLMIT LicenseMIT

MuseumofStolenArtefacts

1. Witnessing Artefacts

Guiding Questions

  • who has encountered/seen/witnessed artefacts? when? how?
  • where is an artefact currently held? how is it (digitally accessed?)

Rationales & Core Aspects

  • there are physical/real (although not necessarily material) objects (aka artefacts)

  • there are digital records; these may witness artefacts or claim their existence (an artefact's existence and attributes are always described through a digital records)

  • coincidence of two digital records (i.e. they (possibly/probably/certainly) refer to the same physical object) is described by a relation between the phyiscal objects they are connected to

  • evidentiality from linguistics (verb aspect e.g. in Bulgarian); useful types of evidentiality (to complement the source itself) include:

    1. indicative (I have observed myself)
    2. inferential (knowing due to inference)
    3. renarrative (someone told me that)
    4. dubitative (I heard that but I have reason to doubt/who I heard from also hasn't observed)
  • recording the absence of an object (I know/believe/suspect that an object exists but have no record of it/don't know where it is held)

Ontology Elements

  • physical object itself - basis for nearly everything else (because we're eventually interested in artefacts)
    • the cultural context it is from (denomination of the culture/group) & evidentiality of that
    • other objects that relate to the object (by being about the object, by describing it)
    • relationships between physical objects (through object categories, being potentially the same, parts of each other)
  • digital records - the lens through which we interact with physical object
  • museums, institutions - entities that hold and, importantly, create and publish digital records about them
    • idetifiers about institutions themselves
    • policies, documents and other contextual materials about object status and restitution
    • (persistent) identifiers assigned by institutions for digital records

2. Describing Artefacts

3. Conversations around Artefacts