Open data dusts off the art world
The Article
“Open data dusts off the art world” talks about Art Tracks from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum
of Art. Art Tracks is a new open data source that turns ownership information of
the painting into structured data by building a suite of open source software
tools so an artwork’s past can be available to museum goers, curators,
researchers and software developers.
The first point I want to talk about
from the article is what the main goal of Art Tracks is. The main goal is to
create a interactive data source where people can access the provenance of
thousands of different pieces of art. The problem when they began to create
this was that the data available wasn’t structured at all. So the developers of
Art Tracks had to do a thorough cleaning and normalizing of the data in order
to even starts Art Tracks which is an incredibly difficulty process. The
developers did this by creating a provenance standard, which is designed to
resolve obscurities and create structure and machine readability.
The second point of Art Track I want
to talk about is the user-facing provenance entry tool it has called Elysa and
the code libraries used by Art track. Elysa and the code libraries are
available on GitHub so users can modify and work with the data. This allows
people to learn from the experts and some will hopefully be able to contribute
in order to improve the software as well. A lead developer of Art Tracks named
Tracey Berg-Fulton said “Using an open data format also creates opportunities
for ongoing partnerships with other experts across the museum community so that
provenance becomes a constant conversation”. More people having access
will lead to more ways of it being interpreted and improved.
The third point from this article I
want to talk about is the implementation of Art Tracks because currently it is
not implemented yet and will take a couple of years. The first phase of
implementation involves showing the effectiveness of Art Tracks through
testing. Phase two takes the prototypes and expands them to other institutions
while also modifying them slightly in order to accommodate each institutions
needs.
The article overlooked what type of
storage they are using for example whether its cloud-based or not, how
expensive the implementation of Art Tracks will be, and whether smaller institutions
will have to update their software in order to be able to access Art Tracks.
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