Model

Status of this Document

This version: 0.9.5 (1.0 Release Candidate 1)

Latest Stable Version: TBA

The Linked Art Data Model is published and maintained by the Editorial Board under the CC BY 4.0 license.

Introduction

The Linked Art Data Model is an application profile that can be used to describe cultural heritage resources, with a focus on artworks and museum-oriented activities. It defines common patterns and terms to ensure that the resulting data can be easily used and is based on real-world data and use cases.

Development of the model for version 1.0 has finished, and the documentation is being tidied for an official release shortly. All of the decisions have been made and documented, all that remains is checking for consistency and accuracy. This does not mean that work stops however -- the community will continue to improve the model over time, and has identified issues to discuss for future versions.

The Linked Art Model

• Introduction
  • How To Read the model documentation, and model versioning
  • Basic Patterns used throughout the model
• Artworks and other Physical Objects
  • Objects
  • Digital Content about or depicting the objects
  • Collections of objects, and other sets
  • Provenance of objects
  • Exhibitions of objects
  • Conservation of objects
• Related People, Places, Concepts and Events
  • People and Organizations
  • Places
  • Concepts
  • Events
  • Vocabulary Terms Used
• Cultural Context
  • Textual Documents
  • Archival Hierarchies
  • Specific Assertions

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

• Index of Examples

Development of the Model

Model Background

Following the existing standards and best practices of the community, our starting point consists of the following background standards:

• CIDOC-CRM as the core conceptual model, giving an event-based paradigm.
  • We use a streamlined subset of CIDOC-CRM 7.1.3 to ensure consistency and comprehension.
• The Getty Vocabularies as core sources of identity for domain-specific terminology
  • Terminology is divided into three lists: required, recommended and optional based on whether systems will be interoperable if different choices were made.
• The concrete expression of the profile and access to data is fully covered in the API documentation.
  • The core serialization format is JSON-LD 1.1

Scope and Process

Development Process

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)

For more information about how you can participate in Linked Art, please see the Community section of the website.

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 the intent to publish beyond system boundaries is.
• Complex Bibliography and Archival Descriptions
  • The thorough description of bibliographic and archival resources in Linked Data is the subject of several ongoing discussions in the Library and Archives domains. We feel that the Art and Museum community should adopt whatever solution is devised by the experts in that field for complex bibliographic or archival description, however Linked Art will provide an on-ramp to those domains by defining the basic descriptions using our shared patterns.
• 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.