Modelling Intellectual Processes: The FRBR - CRM Harmonization Martin Doerr 1 and Patrick LeBoeuf 2 1 ICS-FORTH martin@ics.forth.gr 2 Bibliotheque National de France PATRICK.LE-BOEUF@bnf.fr Abstract. Even though the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set is well accepted as a general solution, it fails to describe more complex infor- mation assets and their cross-correlation. These include data from po- litical history, history of arts and sciences, archaeology or observational data from natural history or geosciences. Therefore IFLA and ICOM are merging their core ontologies, an important step towards semantic interoperability of metadata schemata across all archives, libraries and museums. It opens new prospects for advanced global information inte- gration services. The first draft of the combined model was published in June 2006. 1 Introduction Semantic interoperability of Digital Libraries, Library- and Collection Manage- ment Systems requires compatibility of both the employed Knowledge Orga- nization Systems (KOS; eg classification systems, terminologies, authority files, gazetteers) and of the employed data and metadata schemata. Currently, the no- tion and scope of Digital Libraries covers not only traditional publications, but also scientific and cultural heritage data. The difference between traditional pub- lication in text form and structured data in form of databases is more and more blurring, with databases containing texts in XML form, texts and multimedia data being described by structured metadata records, and Natural Language Processing techniques extracting structured information from free texts. The grand vision is to see all these data integrated so that users are effectively sup- ported in searching for and analyzing data across all domains. Even though the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set is well accepted as a general solution, it fails to describe more complex information assets and their cross-correlation. These include data from political history, history of arts and sciences, archaeology or observational data from natural history or geosciences etc. Core ontologies describing the semantics of metadata schemata are the most effective tool to drive global schema and information integration [1], and provide a more robust, scalable solution than tailored ‘cross-walks’ between individual schemata. Information and queries are mapped to and from the core ontology, C. Thanos, F. Borri, and L. Candela (Eds.): Digital Libraries: R&D, LNCS 4877, pp. 114–123, 2007. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007