Since I last wrote about EODEM (the Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model), three months ago, we have been busy. The net result is a new draft of the standard (now available via CIDOC’s new document repository, by the way.) Whilst this is not yet final, it marks a significant evolution of the draft, and we don’t expect to make too many more changes.

Importantly, several terms which we needed as Linked Data URIs in order to help us describe parts of an EODEM document, have now been added to the Getty’s AAT, and to LIDO Terminology; we’re grateful both to those who helped us draw up the list of candidate terms and their definitions, and to the staff of both projects for adding the new terms so quickly.

We’ve also been liaising with the LIDO Working Group and the related KONDA project about how to establish EODEM as a formal LIDO profile. This is not trivial: it involves the creation of a single document containing a formal EODEM XML Schema, expressed as a series of restrictions to the LIDO Schema; a richer Schematron to help pinpoint errors in EODEM documents; and documentation of the EODEM profile (based upon the TEI standard) that can be incorporated into the Schema.

As we are the first formal profile to be adopted by LIDO in this way, the precise format for the document, as well as the various templates that will need to be applied to it to produce working files, are still being agreed – and will then need to be developed. However, once these have been settled, we hope to be able to produce a public beta EODEM LIDO profile fairly quickly.

For now, though, here’s a summary of the substantive changes in the new profile:

• Value Group moved from eventDescriptionSet to eventObjectMeasurements
• Newly-established AAT and LIDO Terminology terms and URIs added
• All LIDO Terminology lexical URIs replaced with numeric URIs
• Count limit on individual object requirement units of information removed
• Warnings added where we plan to replace eventDescriptionSet ‘type’ attribute string values with URIs

We’ve also made a few changes to the arrangement of the profile document, which hopefully makes it easier to use. We have:

• Added some extra headings to help organise XML paths
• Expanded the Controlled Terminology sections, specifying the precise values where only single values are permitted, and converting all URIs and references to LIDO Terminology headings to hyperlinks
• Removed the Rule and Null sections, as these duplicate information in the Count section
• Made Data Type entries clearer
• Removed the repetitive elements of XML paths from all descendant units of information
• Added a list of all the AAT and LIDO Terminology terms that we use, as an appendix

And so work continues, notably on integration with the emerging LIDO profile infrastructure, and identifying terms to use in eventDescriptionSet’s ‘type’ attribute. But in the meantime, you can see all public EODEM documents in the CIDOC document repository; and there is further information available on the main CIDOC website’s EODEM page.