Conservation and Heritage Science documentation are overarching terms used to cover the description and record of any relevant materials, activities, processes, people, places, and events involved in the history of a cultural heritage object. Cataloguing an object’s composition, condition and how it has degraded or been damaged overtime, along with all the work that has been done to retard, treat and study this degradation process. So, this work can cover the full range of historic activities right up to the ever-increasing detail and complexity of modern scientific analytical techniques. The amount of time and expertise needed to record everything in a meaningful and re-usable fashion can rapidly progress past the level that is realistic for the many different specialists working in this field. A balance must be established between the effort and time required and the future benefit of the recorded information; key to this process is making use of appropriate tools to maximise the efficiency of the documentation process.

Over the last decade large amounts of time and money have been invested in the development of conservation-related documentation systems^[1] and digital tools^[2], to help with this documentation process. Some of this work has taken place within specific institutions while other larger projects, most notably the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded ConservationSpace^[3] and ResearchSpace^[4] projects, have been developed through multi-institutional collaborations. However, these new tools and systems are often developed for specific purposes and can still require a fair amount of technical know-how or support to implement, populate and access. Also, even with all this work, many specialists in the field are still using simple digital file folders or are stuck with older institution-specific databases that struggle to meet their current requirements. In many cases people are also still working with analogue filling systems.

Additional research is often required to provide a bridge between current working practice and new, complete integrated digital solution. The work presented here was carried out to provide a range of worked, practical examples of how data gathered during the study and examination of heritage objects can be described in relation to the CIDOC CRM^[5] ontology, to aid with future data mapping and data interoperability processes.

The CIDOC CRM has continued to undergo development during this project, the references included in this document have been updated to try to reflect the latest draft version at the time of writing, which was version 6.2.7^[6]. In addition to the development of the core CRM and number of additional compatible models^[7] have been developed to provide additional ontological models for specific areas of research. The work presented in this deliverable could overlap with several of these extensions, particularly the CRMsci^[8], which is being developed to help model scientific observations. However, as this CRMsci extension is still under active development it was decided that the work included in this deliverable would be limited to the core CRM ontology. This was done to examine how flexible the main standard could be and to help highlight where new simplifications or clarifications could enhance the included models.

The work presented here is also intended to develop and evolve over time to reflex input from the wider semantic community, with new versions of the model being included to correct for any identified issues or errors and improve the scope of the examples provided.

The initial work of creating the semantic models was carried out as part of the IPERION-CH H2020 project^[9], but the reformatting of the models and the creation of this web resource has been carried out as part of the SSHOC H2020 project^[10].