OpenART: Open metadata for art research at the tate

Abstract

AbstractEditor's SummaryThe short‐term OpenART project was geared to exposing linked open data for the research dataset, “The London Artworld 1660‐1735,” of the Tate Britain art gallery, enabling viewers to learn about activities in the art world of the times. Work for the project required decisions and choices about using open data, starting with considering use cases and identifying entities and relationships. The dataset was modeled and expressed in the Resource Description Framework, using an event – art sales – as the central component of the model. An OpenART ontology was developed to provide domain‐specific descriptors and integrated with existing ontologies to provide semantic interoperability. The resulting event‐based ontology supported reciprocal statements about entities revolving around an event, as well as references back to other types of information for greater detail. Data was transformed from spreadsheets to RDF documents, served to a data repository and provided with persistent URLs. The OpenART project demonstrated practical approaches to exposing linked open data while enabling sharing and creative reuse of the research data.