The Domain

The Cielo Drive murders were a series of brutal killings that occurred in Los Angeles, California in August 1969. The murders were carried out by members of the Manson Family cult, under instruction of Charles Manson himself. The crimes shocked the nation and Manson and several of his followers were eventually convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The victims were actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant at the time, and four other people who were at her home: the house was formerly occupied by music producer Terry Melcher, who Manson believed had promised him a recording contract but had failed to deliver.

Manson believed that the murders would incite a race war, which he called "Helter Skelter," and that he and his followers would emerge as the rulers of a new world order. However, the motive for the Cielo Drive murders was ultimately tied to Manson's desire for power and control over his followers, as well as his twisted belief in apocalyptic racial warfare.

The aim of the CieLODrive project is to use the tools of Linked Open Data (LOD) to explore the knowledge organization and representation of this well-known crime event, focusing on the way it was perceived and interpreted by different media platforms. In order to accomplish this, we have chosen eleven items connected to the domain that could help us represent the evolution of this case.

The selected objects all refer to the main event of our study, some relate to the figure of Charles Manson, others to the trial of the case in the Californian state court, and still others analyse the recent transposition of the events in the new media.

Knowledge Organisation

Conceptual Map

The first step in the modeling process is to explain the event through a conceptual map: this map needs to represent explicitly the data extracted from the items and their relationships. We placed the crime event at the center of our graph, using it as a starting point for the study of the domain. We then connected the items from our collection to the Cielo Drive murders and to the real metadata present on the objects cultural organizations records, highlighting the most important elements and concepts.
For the selection of the most important metadata related to each item, we tried to select the information that answered the main questions of: who, where, when, what.

Furthermore, to allow a better description of the domain, we have included in the model an entity representing the figure of Charles Manson and an entity for the event of the court trial.

Open the image of the graph

E/R Model

The following step is to translate the conceptual map into an entity-relationship model by abstracting from particular categories to more universal ones. The goal is to graphically represent our domain employing a more general perspective.

Open the image of the graph

Metadata Analysis and Alignment

Metadata Analysis

The metadata analysis is carried out by identifying the metadata standards provided by the institutions of each of our objects. In some cases we were not able to directly access or retrieve the metadata standards, so we adopted the ones that could best describe the features of our items. The aforementioned standards are listed as follows:

1. PBCore is a cataloging standard for the description of audiovisual content, a data sharing tool, and much more. Since its development in the early 2000s, dozens of organizations have been using PBCore's comprehensive and flexible features for their archiving needs.


2. DublinCore is an organization supporting innovation in metadata design and best practices across the metadata ecology.


3. MARC21 is designed to be a carrier for bibliographic information about printed and manuscript textual materials, computer files, maps, music, continuing resources, visual materials, and mixed materials.


4. MMD XML schema is an XML based document format to represent music metadata, easy to read, powerful and extensible.


5. ICA RIC-O (Records in Contexts-Ontology) is an OWL ontology for describing archival record resources. As the second part of Records in Contexts standard, it is a formal representation of Records in Contexts Conceptual Model (RiC-CM).


6. IPTC (Photo Metadata Standard) structures and defines metadata properties that allow users to add precise and reliable data about images.


7. Schema.org ontology is based on RDFa, a markup language for embedding structured data in HTML documents, and it can also be expressed in other RDF serialization formats such as JSON-LD, Turtle, and RDF/XML.


8. The International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) is the standard that determines the data elements to be recorded or transcribed in a specific sequence as the basis of the description of the resource being cataloged.

Index	Item	Title	Provider	Provider Metadata Standard	Chosen Metadata Standard
1	Book	"Helter Skelter : the true story of Manson murders"	ISBD	ISBD	ISBD
2	TV Episode	"Charles(Manson) in charge"	IMDb	/	schema.org
3	Trial Transcription	"Tate - La Bianca Trial Transcription"	CieloDrive.org	/	MARC21
4	Photo	"Tate Trial Transcripts"	Calisphere.org	/	Dublin Core
5	Song	"Helter Skelter"	MusicBrainz	MusicBrainz	Music Brainz
6	Movie	"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"	IMDb	/	PBCore
7	Article	"Actress is Among 5 Slain at Home in Beverly Hills"	nytimes.com	IPTC NewsCodes	MARC21
8	Photo	Coroners with Sharon Tate's body	Getty Images	/	IPTC standard
9	Video	Charles Manson appears in court for a preliminary hearing	AP Newsroom	AP Ontology	ICA-RIC-O
10	Article	"The sinister influence of Charles Manson"	The New Yorker	/	MARC21
11	Drawing	Charles Manson on the witness stand	Library of Congress	LOC	Dublin Core

Metadata Alignment

After completing the metadata analysis, we moved to the alignment which consists of choosing the most appropriate labels (according to the metadata standards) to express the properties of the chosen items, based on the predicates used in the conceptual map and E/R model.

It's necessary to specify that if the provided/chosen standard lacked a property, we employed a property from a more general standard to produce the alignment.

Alignment: