
The Art Metadata Project seeks to revolutionize how information about fine art is organized by creating an open-source data standard that would be usable by artists, galleries, museums, collectors, curators, critics and art historians.
At this moment, there are countless institutions who have independent archives of artists and their works that exist in a multitude of data formats.
We want to create one standard that all those institutions could publish to, along with one non-profit unique-identifying-number-granting body, that would make it possible for all of those databases (or their public subset) to be interoperable.
We would like to create an environment where various third-party developers could compete to create applications for aggregating, sorting, filtering and displaying the information about fine art that is made public through this standard by any organization or individual. Various companies could sell products and services based upon this standard but no company would own the standard itself.
AMP essentially will have two distinct parts:
- An XML-based data standard similar to RSS that would provide places for all the standard information that is usually kept on artists and their works. For example, the artists themselves will have their name, nationality, birth and death dates, education, awards, and exhibitions they participated in displayed. The artist’s works would list its’ title, dimensions, medium, year, description, lists of exhibitions where it was exhibited, etc. The standard would be loose enough to allow for special-purpose fields to be inserted for certain kinds of work.
- A non-profit, disinterested body, funded in a manner T.B.D. who’s mission is to grant and record unique identifying numbers to artists and some system of creating UIDs for artworks based on the artist number.
We think it will be important to distinguish between official and un-official information. Examples of official information would be the listing of an artist provided by the artist themselves or their official designates, like galleries or collectors – or in the case of deceased artists, the holders of collections of their work like universities, foundations or museums. Examples of un-official information might be information about that work created by other artists, critics or art historians. Its important that the system encourage conversation and dialogue about works of art rather than stifle it and we think that by letting the UID’s be available for aggregating commentary as well as official information, while also distinguishing which is which we’ll find the right balance. Third party applications can use this distinction to create filtering settings that will let the users decide what kind of information they want about a given work.
We also imagine that one group of fields in the standard could include the concept of “influence” where the artist themselves in the case of living artists, or the curator of the museum that owned the piece, or the collector that owns the piece in the case of deceased artists could list a finite number ( finite because making it infinite would be an invitation to abuse, maybe up to 5?) of artists or artworks that influenced the artist generally or influenced a specific piece. This would allow for influence trees and all sorts of other potential applications.
Bottom line, we envision an open-source standard that can be adopted by a multitude of developers. No matter how data is held in various databases, that data, or the public subset of that data, can be exported in the AMP standard to make it available to everyone. A system like this will make it easier for art lovers to find and discuss the art they are interested in, and help artists and arts institutions cut down on data-entry time. If implemented fully a given artwork might have its information entered once when it was created and that information would never have to be entered again as it was exported from artist’s database to the databases of galley or curator, museum or collector. A researcher wanting to write about a given work could do a search on a given UID and easily find everything about that work existing in every participating database.