A glossary for connected research
The distinctions that make a source, a sounding object and a digital experience easier to understand.
This glossary explains how recurring terms are used in the notebooks. It is a reading aid; the versioned specifications remain authoritative for formal definitions and conformance requirements.
Objects and representations
- Organology
- The study of musical instruments, including their construction, histories, use and relationships. MODAVIS brings documentary, material and digital evidence into that inquiry.
- Work through the Cuntz example →
- Instrument state
- A historically scoped condition or arrangement of an instrument. A statement about one state should not automatically describe the instrument at every date.
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- Configuration
- An identified arrangement of components and their relationships. Rebuilding or reassigning parts can change a configuration while the instrument’s broader identity persists.
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- Digital surrogate
- A representation of a subject, such as a photograph or model. The representation and the thing represented remain different entities.
- Work through the Cuntz example →
- Virtual instrument
- A playable digital representation whose behaviour depends on particular resources, mappings and software. It is not identical to the physical instrument it may represent.
- Work through the Cuntz example →
- Auralization
- Making an acoustic situation audible through a defined rendering or modelling process. The listening result depends on source, propagation and receiver assumptions.
- Work through the Cuntz example →
Sources and interpretation
- Source account
- An attributed description associated with a particular source. Several accounts can describe one instrument without being identical or independent.
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- Assertion
- A statement that can be identified, attributed, qualified and reviewed. Its presence in a source or dataset does not by itself establish truth.
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- Evidence
- Material offered as grounds for a claim. Its relevance depends on the claim, context, transmission and interpretation.
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- Provenance
- The documented origin and processing or editorial history of a resource or statement. It explains how a result came about.
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- Context
- The circumstances within which a statement applies, such as a historical configuration. Context is distinct from the history of how the statement was recorded.
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- Abstention
- Leaving a proposed interpretation or link unresolved when available evidence is insufficient. It preserves a research question instead of forcing a false precision.
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- Canonical projection
- An accepted, governed research view derived from evidence and decisions. It can support convenient use while retaining a route to the richer underlying account.
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Packages and preservation
- Semantic release
- A fixed VAO manifest and the exact realizations it identifies. Different carriers can transport selections from the same release.
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- Logical asset
- An intellectual or functional resource, such as a take, a mesh or a score. Its role is distinguished from the particular bytes used to represent it.
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- Realization
- One exact byte sequence representing an asset. Different encodings or derivatives have different exact identities.
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- Carrier
- A package or workspace that contains a manifest, carrier mapping and selected realizations. Bootstrap, preservation-closure and custom carriers serve different delivery purposes.
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- Fixity
- The ability to check that content matches a recorded identity, commonly through a cryptographic digest. It establishes sameness relative to that reference, not scientific truth.
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- Profile
- A versioned set of additional requirements. A client must satisfy the declared capabilities before claiming full support for that profile.
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- Version DOI
- A persistent identifier for a particular deposited release. A broader project or concept identifier may instead lead to a family of releases.
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- Reproducibility
- A claim that a specified procedure can be repeated with a stated kind of agreement. Byte equality, numerical tolerance and historical interpretation require different evidence.
- Work through the Cuntz example →
The graph languages, in ordinary language
- RDF
- A graph data model: statements connect a subject to an object through an identified relationship. For Cuntz, an observation can point to the pipe it describes and the evidence it uses.
- Follow a Cuntz observation through the graph →
- IRI
- An internationalized resource identifier. It identifies a thing or term across records independently of its display label. The Cuntz instrument, pipe observation and source realization need distinct identifiers.
- Read an identifier without guessing its meaning →
- OWL
- A language for expressing ontology meanings and logical relationships between classes. It helps state why a physical organ and a digital package representing it are distinct kinds of thing.
- Compare ontology meaning and validation →
- SHACL
- A language for checking an RDF data graph against declared shapes and constraints. It can find a modeling error; it does not independently settle a disputed historical register count.
- Work through a hypothetical Cuntz modeling error →
- JSON-LD context
- An explicit mapping that connects JSON terms to linked-data identifiers and meanings. Its version matters when interpreting a preserved VAO record.
- Read the actual Cuntz observation excerpt →
- SKOS
- A model for controlled concepts, labels and their relationships. A vocabulary concept such as an instrument type remains distinct from a particular museum object.
- Separate a Cuntz label from a type concept →
- Dependency closure
- The complete set of prerequisites for a selected task, obtained by following every required dependency. It can be smaller than the whole preservation package.
- Follow a model and its dependencies →
- Observation
- A record connecting a property and result to the thing observed, with a method and source context. A number alone leaves those relationships unspecified.
- Explain the 1281 mm Cuntz observation →
Sources & further reading
- VAO Standard 0.5.0
- MODAVIS Ontology Network 0.1.0
- Dominik Ukolov · Musikinstrumente im virtuellen Raum (2026)
Dissertation submitted to Universität Leipzig, 11 September 2026. Chapters 1–6 and 8; Appendix I.4 for the software and resource inventory. See the dedicated research guides for claim-specific section references. Page numbers refer to the printed manuscript pagination. The manuscript is not distributed by this website.
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