TEI and cultural heritage ontologies: Exchange of information?

The content in information systems and virtual reconstructions in the cultural heritage sector is to a large degree directly based on information deduced from the study of texts. In many cases, even if the texts are available electronically, the links from the deduced facts to the original texts are not available and in many cases very costly to re-establish. Reproducibility of results is a core concept in text-based research as in all research. Thus, such links should be expressed explicitly in the systems and in accordance with the data standards developed in the fields of text encoding and conceptual modelling. To do this it is necessary to create a combined understanding of text encoding represented by the TEI guidelines and the understanding of conceptual models represented by initiatives like the CIDOC CRM and FRBRoo. In this article, we study a part of this complex by comparing the expressive power of the real world descriptions TEI P5 by mapping central parts of the CIDOC CRM onto TEI P5. It is clear that the TEI P5 has moved a great step in the direction towards an event-oriented model compared with TEI P4. Our use of CIDOC CRM as a yardstick shows that the expressiveness of TEI P5 can be greatly improved by extending the scope of very restricted elements like the relation element and adding a few new elements to the TEI.