Linked Art Data Model

The desired target model for Linked Open Data in the Art domain is one with the following properties:

• Captures as much of the information that we know about the resources as possible
• Can be productively used via easy to implement services
• Provides interoperability with other related data sets
• Solves actual challenges, which are documented as use cases

Successful models are developed:

• iteratively (we will not get it right the first time)
• responsively (we will change the model in response to feedback and concerns)
• responsibly (we will consider changes and features carefully with respect to complexity and value)
• collaboratively (we will engage with the community, projects and individuals early and often)

Model Fundamentals

Following the existing norms of the community, our starting point consists of:

• CIDOC-CRM as the core ontology, giving an event-based paradigm
  • We use a streamlined profile of CIDOC-CRM to ensure consistency and comprehension.
• The Getty Vocabularies as core sources of identity
  • Please see the vocabularies best practice discussion.
• JSON-LD as the primary target serialization
  • We use a specific context designed to be as easy to implement as possible.

These are then expanded from if necessary in order to fulfill shared use cases and common requirements.

Model Components

The model can be treated as interlinking components that describe aspects of the events of interest. The target context for JSON-LD is described first, as the examples within the other documentation use it for readability.

• Shared Patterns across the model
• Object descriptions
• Provenance of Objects
• People and Organizations
• Places
• Collections and Sets
• Exhibitions of Objects
• Primary Sources of information
• Assertion level metadata
• Dataset level metadata

An index of all of the classes, properties and identities used:

• Index of Examples

Scope Limitations

• Interoperability
  • The goal of the work is interoperability between systems, not to provide a comprehensive data model to describe everything that a single institution might know. This implies that management and production of the data is out of scope as a system specific concern. Similarly, the exact models used within those systems are not our concern. These would otherwise violate the technology independency principle. Open access is not a requirement, but publishing beyond system boundaries is.
• Complex Bibliography
  • The thorough description of bibliographic resources in Linked Data is the subject of several ongoing discussions in the Library domain. We feel that the Art and Museum community should adopt whatever solution is devised by the experts in that field for complex bibliographic description, if necessary beyond the model described for documents generally.
• Data Provenance
  • Recording the individual events in which the data itself is created, modified and managed is out of scope of this work. The global Linked Open Data community has various approaches to this problem, with varying degrees of complexity and accuracy. Given the relative infancy of the work in the Art domain, we feel that adding this is an unnecessary burden at this stage at any level below the entire dataset.
• Quantification of Uncertainty
  • Similarly, the degree of certainty about the data being expressed is valuable and of interest to researchers, but requires a significantly more complex environment. This would also prove an unsustainable burden, and is impractical to use even if it were provided.