The “CIDOC 2011 – Knowledge Management and Museums” conference took place in Sibiu in Romania on September 4-9, 2011. The conference is an annual event, organized by ICOM-CIDOC, that is the Committee for Documentation at the International Council of Museums.

The conference participants came from very different, but cooperating environments: museologists, librarians, programmers and museum software vendors, researchers in the field of ontologies and semantic web,
and also people and institutions concerned with museum documentation standards.

The conference included meetings of CIDOC working groups:

• Archaeological Sites
• Conceptual Reference Model Special Interest Group
• Co-reference
• Data Harvesting and Interchange
• Digital preservation
• Documentation Standards
• Information Centres
• Multimedia
• Transdisciplinary Approaches in Documentation

A number of topics were raised at the conference which are tightly connected with PSNC’s work in the SYNAT project. The most prominent ones were:

• LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) specification (www.lido-schema.org/) for description of museum resources made available online
• recommendation to use persistent, unique identifiers (URIs) of museum resources
• FRBRoo ontology which merges CIDOC CRM and FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) to properly describe digital resources online (www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/tillett2004.ppt, http://www.frbr.org/categories/frbroo)
• Wiss-ki system presentation (http://wiss-ki.eu/, http://www8.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/transdisc/hohmann_cidoc09_wisski-2.pdf). The goals and assumptions of the project are very close to those of SYNAT. Some of the already used solutions might possibly be used in SYNAT.

The next CIDOC conference will take place in June 2012 in Helsinki. Additionally, the CIDOC “summer school” for people taking care of museum documentation is planned for the holiday period of 2012.