Extended Matrix at the heart of European projects

Extended Matrix is no longer “just” the documentation method developed at CNR-ISPC. It is now an active building block of two converging European initiatives that are reshaping how cultural heritage knowledge is produced, shared and preserved.

StratiGraph

The StratiGraph project — funded by the European Commission — picks up the EM stratigraphic-graph framework and scales it to the level of a shared European infrastructure. Within StratiGraph, EM provides the typed vocabulary and the reasoning model; the project, in turn, brings the resources to harden EM as a long-term standard: versioning policy, LTS (long-term support) releases, formal change-control, and sustained funding for the maintenance of the formal language.

For users, this means the EM you adopt today will still be readable, documented and tooled in ten years.

ECCCH and CIDOC-CRM alignment

StratiGraph is also where EM’s CIDOC-CRM alignment matures. The property graph generated by s3dgraphy already maps to CIDOC-CRM classes; the StratiGraph work programme commits to publishing the full mapping spec, the validation suite, and a reference triplestore export. This makes EM-produced data first-class citizens of the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) — the Commission’s flagship infrastructure for FAIR, interoperable heritage data across the continent.

In practical terms, an EM graph authored on a single excavation can travel — without translation — into the same federated knowledge space as a national digital library, a museum collection, or a monument register.

What changes for the community

• A clear standardisation roadmap: LTS policy, semantic-version governance, and a published change-control process.
• A published CIDOC-CRM mapping maintained as part of the official EM specification, not as a side project.
• Funded ECCCH connectors: out-of-the-box bridges from EM Tools and Heriverse to the Collaborative Cloud’s data spaces.
• Continued integration with national infrastructures (PNRR / H2IOSC in Italy) and with the EM Framework’s own tools.

For day-to-day users this is mostly transparent — graphs and projects already authored remain valid, and the new export targets become available from EM Tools and Heriverse without extra work.

Where to follow progress

• The StratiGraph workstream tracker (link forthcoming).
• The EM development projects board.
• Release notes for the EM language itself, on docs.extendedmatrix.org.

If your institution is interested in piloting EM as part of an ECCCH connector or a national heritage data space, get in touch via Telegram or by email at emanuel.demetrescu@cnr.it.