LIDO

Key takeaways

LIDO belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect LIDO to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of LIDO from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO) is an XML schema for describing museum or collection objects. Memory institutions use LIDO for “exposing, sharing and connecting data on the web”. It can be applied to all kind of disciplines in cultural heritage, e.g. art, natural history, technology, etc. LIDO is a specific application of CIDOC CRM.

Background Digital descriptions of pieces of cultural heritage consist of several parts. These encompass at least textual cataloging information as well as one or more digital surrogates, e.g. a photograph or a 3D scan. Access to this information is effected by the means of metadata records, which provide not only information about the object described (e.g. a painting’s title or the date of its creation) but also contain information about the data record itself (e.g. by whom it has been created and when). LIDO provides an XML based schema for these types of information and serves as common ground for sharing metadata. It enables web portals to integrate information from different organizations (like museums or collections) in a standardized format. Hereby it simplifies the dissemination of data. LIDO is used e.g. by the German Digital Library, Europeana and the Yale Center for British Art at Yale University.

History Organizations creating digital records oftentimes use their own formats for storing information in their collections. This makes sharing their data difficult: Websites like Europeana that combine information from different sources and provide them on a single platform face the challenge of integrating heterogeneous data formats. The web portal owner has to write a crosswalk for each external metadata format which is both costly and time-consuming. As a result, data might not get the exposure it could since the web portal might not have the resources to create and maintain the crosswalks. To avoid this situation international experts developed LIDO as a harvesting standard. It roots in CDWA Lite by the J. Paul Getty Trust, museumdat by the German Museums Association, and SPECTRUM XML Schema by the UK Collections Trust. It is a specific application of CIDOC CRM. While work on LIDO started in 2008, its first version has been released during the ICOM/CIDOC conference in Shanghai in 2010. LIDO is continuously refined by cultural heritage experts.

Principles As an XML Schema LIDO is strictly hierarchical. It summarizes each chunk of information about an object in a set encapsulated by a wrapper element, e.g.:LIDO provides descriptive as well as administrative information about an object. The descriptive part includes (among others): classificatory information (sort of object, genre, shape, ...) identificatory information (name, inscriptions, measurements, description of the object, ...) events in the object’s history (creation, production, restoration, acquisition, loss, persons/places/objects involved in the event, …) connection to other entities (concepts, persons/places/objects involved, …) The administrative part provides (again, among others) details about:

rights associated with the object information about the record itself (ID, format, provenance, license…) information about the digital resource (link to the record, linked pages, …) LIDO also differentiates between information users see on a website (display information) and information used for searching and retrieval (indexing information).

A core concept of LIDO is modelling an object’s history according to the events in which it was involved. This concept has its source in CIDOC CRM and provides an opportunity to gain new insights about the object or persons involved:"This event-centric approach [of CIDOC CRM] makes it possible to map the properties of an object with references to the actors involved, to location, and time more precisely. Thus, it supports the (automatic) uncovering of correlations between originally scattered information and it contributes to the contextualization of objects.”LIDO also provides the possibility to connect data with authority files. This essentially facilitates a subsequent publication as Linked Data, thereby contributing to the Semantic Web.

LIDO terminology The LIDO Terminology is a complement to the current LIDO v1.0 specification. Its main purpose it to define controlled vocabularies for certain LIDO elements and attributes which are made referenceable through a URI. Thereby the LIDO Terminology is committed to Linked Open Data and increases the interoperability of LIDO records.

Relationship to CIDOC CRM CIDOC CRM is an object-oriented and extensible ontology. It defines concepts and relationships that are necessary for the description of cultural heritage objects. Being an ontology, CIDOC CRM is based on formal logic and graph oriented. LIDO, on the other hand, is a specific XML based application of CIDOC CRM. It has been developed for harvesting metadata. Other than CIDOC CRM LIDO is a schema and thereby strictly hierarchic. It adopts aspects of its predecessor, CDWA, but heavily relies on CIDOC CRM's classes, e.g. E5 Event, E39 Actor, E55 Type.

LIDO tools A few tools are available for handling LIDO:

OAICatMuseum by OCLC Research allows publication of museum data as LIDO or CDWA, using the OAI-PMH protocol MINT is a general tool for metadata mapping developed by National Technical University of Athens that is often used by Europeana-related projects. It can map to EDM or LIDO LIBIS has created a LIDO profile for the CollectiveAccess open source Collection Management System. This allows museums to catalog objects directly in LIDO. While LIDO is not a fully-fledged museum Collection Management schema (e.g. like SPECTRUM by the Collections Trust), it is quite sufficient for most collections.

Further reading Gordon McKenna, Stefan Rohde-Enslin, Regine Stein: Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO): The International Harvesting Standard for Museums. 2011. Regine Stein, Oguzhan Balandi: Using LIDO for Evolving Object Documentation into CIDOC CRM. In: Heritage 2019, 2, S. 1023–1031.

External links CIDOC LIDO Working Group: http://www.lido-schema.org What is LIDO? LIDO Specification LIDO Terminology LIDO Terminology LOD Web interface LIDO Terminology LOD SPARQL interface

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with LIDO

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what LIDO claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to LIDO before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about LIDO ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of LIDO

In research: LIDO appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses LIDO in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: LIDO is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Metadata standards, Museum informatics, XML-based standards, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for LIDO outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study LIDO in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what LIDO means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain LIDO out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is LIDO in simple terms?

Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO) is an XML schema for describing museum or collection objects. Memory institutions use LIDO for “exposing, sharing and connecting data on the web”.

Why does LIDO matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study LIDO?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on LIDO.