Voon, C. (2016, August 11). Interactive maps of the Metropolitan Museum offer fresh views of its permanent collections. Retrieved August 19, 2016, from http://hyperallergic.com/314638/interactive-maps-of-the-metropolitan-museum-offer-fresh-views-of-its-permanent-collections/
This article discusses web-based projects created by SVA’s MFA in Visual Narrative program focused on mapping collections at the Metropolitan Museum. Students created mixed media maps based on data collected from various galleries at the museum. These maps connected objects in unexpected ways; Rosa Chang, for instance, created a map of indigo-colored objects at the Met, and Christina Ebert explored the poses of female figures in Southeast Asian sculpture. While not directly related to linked data, this article was interesting to read in thinking about recontextualizing and making connections between museum objects.
Meier, A. (2015, September 05). Carnegie Museum of Art makes its provenance accessible and interactive. Retrieved September 23, 2016, from https://hyperallergic.com/234563/carnegie-museum-of-art-makes-its-provenance-accessible-and-interactive/
This article discusses the Carnegie Museum of Art’s ArtTracks project, which seeks to provide open access to the museum’s provenance data. Created by the Carnegie Museum’s Digital Media Lab along with its education and curatorial departments, the project is focused on addressing questions of authenticity and of the ethicality of the acquisition of the museum’s collection (such as whether any of its pieces came from Nazi-looted sources). ArtTracks’ interactive provenance tool, accessible at the museum and online, allows users to trace the provenance sources of the Carnegie’s artworks on a map, and to view a timeline of their ownership and purchase. Since this article appeared on Hyperallergic, the ArtTracks project has also published its own Digital Provenance Standard, based on the CIDOC-CRM, as well as a vocabulary of provenance-related metadata terms, and has made a variety of open-source digital tools for working with provenance data, such as Elysa, mentioned in the article, available on its GitHub repository.
Koutraki, M., & Doerr, M. (2010, March). Mapping LIDO v0.7 to CIDOC-CRM v5.0.1 (Working paper). Retrieved November 10, 2016, from ICOM/CIDOC Documentation Standards Group website: http://www.cidoc-crm.org/Resources/the-lido-model
This paper prescribes methods for mapping the LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) metadata schema to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. LIDO is an XML harvesting schema created by the International Council of Museums’ CIDOC Documentation Standards Group. LIDO has been adopted as a standard for harvesting museum data by many institutions in the cultural heritage sector, including AthenaPlus, the best-practices network responsible for Europeana. The CIDOC-CRM, also created by the ICM Documentation Standards Group, is a conceptual model for expressing concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation, and is in part the basis for LIDO. Koutraki and Doerr’s paper presents diagrams of how the descriptive and administrative metadata elements in LIDO map to RDF triple statements created used CIDOC classes and properties.
Provo, A. (2016, March 8-12). Florentine Renaissance Drawings: A Linked Catalogue for the Semantic Web. Proceedings from the ARLIS/NA VRA 3rd Joint Conference. Seattle, WA: ARLIS/NA. Retrieved December 12, 2016, from https://www.arlisna.org/images/conferences/2016/s23p01-Provo.pdf
In this presentation, Alex Provo discusses the process of the creation of Florentine Renaissance Drawings: A Linked Catalogue for the Semantic Web. A project of the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florentine Renaissance Drawings: A Linked Catalogue for the Semantic Web is focused on publishing the three editions of art historian Bernard Berenson’s seminal text on Italian Renaissance art, Drawings of the Florentine Painters, as linked data. Provo outlines four main stages of the project: Creation & Cleanup, Modeling, Transformation, and Publishing. The Creation & Cleanup phase of the project involved extracting the text from the three editions of the model into a series of Google Sheets, then using OpenRefine and Python scripts to combine and standardize the data. The Modeling phase involved mapping the data to the classes and properties of the CIDOC-CRM, as well as exploring the incorporation of terms from other vocabularies like Dublin Core. The Transformation phase involved using two open-source digital tools, 3M and Karma, to map the data to this model. The final phase of the project, Publication, had not happened at the time of Provo’s presentation, but Drawings of the Florentine Painters has since gone live as of April 2017.
Szekely, P., Knoblock, C. A., Yang, F., Zhu, X., Fink, E. E., Allen, R., & Goodlander, G. (2013). Connecting the Smithsonian American Art Museum to the Linked Data Cloud. The Semantic Web: Semantics and Big Data Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 593-607. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-38288-8_40
This paper discusses the process of publishing the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection data as linked open data. Similar to Florentine Renaissance Drawings, the authors of the paper describe three main stages in publishing museum data as linked data: mapping the data to RDF, linking it to external sources, and curating the data to ensure its accuracy. The Smithsonian’s data was mapped to the CIDOC CRM and the Europeana Data Model (EDM) using Karma, a tool developed for the project. The team then linked the Smithsonian’s data to data from DBpedia, a popular structured data repository, along with the Getty Union List of Artists Names (ULAN) and the Rijksmuseum’s linked data dataset. The team then used Karma to further insure that all external data sources were correctly linked, along with PROVO-O, an OWL-based ontology for recording data provenance published by the W3C.