The Softalk Apple Project is pleased to announce adoption of the Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) of the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The CIDOC-CRM is an 'ontology' for cultural heritage information, in other words it describes in a formal language the concepts and relations relevant to the documentation of cultural heritage. This ISO standard will be used as the reference model for the development of the FactMiners Fact Cloud metamodel that will logically organize the 'facts' to be 'mined' out of the digital archive of Softalk magazine, respecting both the elements of its editorial content and the complex document structure of a magazine.

It is truly exciting to be able to 'stand on the shoulders of giants' with respect to formalizing the candidate elements and overall logical organization of the facts that we will be capturing in the FactMiners Fact Cloud describing the content of Softalk magazine. This reference standard will dramatically accelerate our design and implementation of the FactMiners Fact Cloud Wizard component within the core FactMiners Open Source development platform.

A relatively small group of dedicated data scientists and museum informatics professionals have spent nearly twenty years working out an essential set of elements and their logical organization. This means we can get right to work developing our FactMiners Fact Cloud companion of the Softalk archive as a domain-specific extension of the CIDOC-CRM reference model. Doing this, we guarantee Semantic Web and OpenData accessibility which is essential to our project mission.

Our growing collaboration with the www.Structr.org team will benefit greatly from this reference model as we work together to envision and build the FactMiners platform on the Neo4j-powered Structr CMS/web-services platform. Our first efforts will focus on the FactMiners Fact Cloud Wizard described in Part 2 of this Neo4j GraphGist.

More information will be available soon on the www.FactMiners.org Open Source developers community website.