This document gives a curated, factual knowledge about the past at a human scale. It specifies all information required for the exchange and integration of heterogeneous scientific and scholarly documentation about the past at a human scale and the available documented and empirical evidence for this.

A more detailed and useful definition can be articulated by defining both the intended scope, a broad and maximally-inclusive definition of general application principles, and the practical scope, which is expressed by the overall scope of a growing reference set of specific, identifiable documentation standards and practices that this document aims to semantically describe, restricted, always, in its details to the limitations of the intended scope.

The practical scope of this document is expressed in terms of the set of reference standards and de facto standards for documenting factual knowledge. This document covers the same domain of discourse as the union of these reference standards; this means that for data correctly encoded according to these documentation formats there can be an ISO 21127-compatible expression that conveys the same meaning.