who has encountered/seen/witnessed artefacts? when? how?
where is an artefact currently held? how is it (digitally accessed?)
Rationales & Core Aspects
there are physical/real (although not necessarily material) objects (aka artefacts)
there are digital records; these may witness artefacts or claim their existence (an artefact's existence and attributes are always described through a digital records)
coincidence of two digital records (i.e. they (possibly/probably/certainly) refer to the same physical object) is described by a relation between the phyiscal objects they are connected to
evidentiality from linguistics (verb aspect e.g. in Bulgarian); useful types of evidentiality (to complement the source itself) include:
indicative (I have observed myself)
inferential (knowing due to inference)
renarrative (someone told me that)
dubitative (I heard that but I have reason to doubt/who I heard from also hasn't observed)
recording the absence of an object (I know/believe/suspect that an object exists but have no record of it/don't know where it is held)
Ontology Elements
physical object itself - basis for nearly everything else (because we're eventually interested in artefacts)
the cultural context it is from (denomination of the culture/group) & evidentiality of that
other objects that relate to the object (by being about the object, by describing it)
relationships between physical objects (through object categories, being potentially the same, parts of each other)
digital records - the lens through which we interact with physical object
museums, institutions - entities that hold and, importantly, create and publish digital records about them
idetifiers about institutions themselves
policies, documents and other contextual materials about object status and restitution
(persistent) identifiers assigned by institutions for digital records