Early Adopter Blog

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Okay so our our upcoming discussion has been scheduled for Tuesday, July 14, 2009 from 4:00pm – 6:00pm at St. Dymphna’s Pub located in the East Village. The address is 118 Saint Marks Place between 1st ave. & avenue A.
I look forward to seeing everyone there since we’re in the early stages and hoping to gather people and ideas with a very long term outlook- we’re expecting that this standard may not be fully adopted for 20 years but you have to start somewhere. It will be a great atmosphere and there will be beer!
On the Art MetaData Project group on Facebook, you can see the guest list so become a fan and tell your friends to join!

Here’s the link just in case you have not checked out our page yet! AMP

Be sure to look for regular updates and become a fan!  Help spread the word.

The Open Media Metadata Standards Proposal

Is developing an open-source based standard to provide film and video content more accessibility.

Open Archives Initiative

Is working with others as well as independent projects that aim towards creating more effective standards to distribute information.

Consortium for Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI)

The title says it all. It will be interesting to imagine the CIMI’s approach to developing one standard to catergorize information already archived under the museums’ independently run databases.

The Visual Resources Association Data Standards Committee

They have a very useful project proposal guide to good practice in cataloging standards for describing cultural objects and images. Its a useful model for the development of AMP.

The Data Documentation Initiative

Is also looking to establish a standard but it’s for technical documentations describing social sciences. They are currently developing the DDI specification written in XML.

Where? On July 14th around Union Square, sometime in the afternoon.

Who? Myself, Jay and other well-versed individuals in the fields of art and technology, including  David Dombrosky of the Center of Arts Management and Technology at Carnegie Mellon University and Paul Sepuya of the Joan Michelle Foundation.

I look foward to the discussions that will soon take place.  Stayed tuned to read on the topics brought up during our meeting,  as well as a podcast interview of Jay and I about AMP.

RSS podcast feed for AMP

Facebook public profile

New podcasts and updates soon to come so tune in!

Today we are going to discuss RSS and it’s development to help us consider it’s similarities and usefulness as a model to AMP.  This can give us a fresh perspective for the direction of AMP and is open to debate.

RSS is basically a standard for regularly changing web content (news related sites, blogs).  Many sites provide an RSS Feed ensuring privacy by not having to subscribe to Emails newsletters.  The creation of RSS has revolutionized the way we previously utilized the web to search for news, music, and blogs. RSS version 0.9 first introduced by ambitious programmers at Netscape in 1999 according to cyber.law.harvard.ed.  Basically, these programmers got tired of having to always search for the latest news on search engines or favorite sites. To minimize mouse clicks, they strategized a method to make the news come to them. Thus, RSS was born and this later encountered setbacks into further development by the extinction of that Netscape team shortly afterwards. Three years later, MetaWeblog API merges RSS with XML-RPC to provide a powerful blogging API. On www.rss-specifications.com, the site states that RSS version 2.0 was then released through UserLand for commercial interests. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Harvard) granted RSS 2.0 a Creative Commons license in 2003, and is now responsible for the further development of RSS 2.0 specifications.

How can we use RSS as a model for AMP?

I’ve discovered that the similarities between RSS and AMP are greater than previously imagined. RSS is a developed standard that is now followed by thousands of large and independently run sites. Its syntax can be adopted into different platforms and applications. AMP looks to also develop a standard that can be adopted by many different platforms.  RSS also provides greater accessibility to information by having it literally knock on your front door (or feed reader). The same should be available for the art world as well.  With an established system to register artists and their works, hosted under one syntax or standard, art can be scanned like a barcode, or searched under its UID (unique identification number).  Lastly the RSS story can tell us that all breakthrough technologies take time and patience! AMP will definitely change in structure over it’s course. The question is, how can you help shape this upcoming advance in the art world? And what will do you with access to an unlimited and convenient catalog of artists?

Hey everyone,

My name is Natalie and I will be joining Early-Adopter this summer on the Fine Art classification project aka AMP (Art Metadata Project).  I look forward to working with everyone and taking this project to its next level.

Please click on the image to better view the details. Above is a diagram of the second iteration of a possible table structure for the AMP system. The lower right corner shows a web article about the artist Mel Kadel. In this example, we are showing a meta tag of this page that has the AMP UID for Mel Kadel. Readers can use a widget or plug-in to use this UID in order to access more information about this artist.

In this table structure, we are showing three connected tables: Artist Table, Influence Table, and Artwork Table. With the UID for or the name of the artist, users of the system will be able to access descriptions of the artist that are provided by either the artist or aggregated from Wikipedia. The UID connects to the Artwork Table that can be accessed to view specific information about all of the registered works of art from that artist.

Additionally, the UID connects to the Influence table. This table connects the artist with their influences. The artist will select their influences when registering their UID or updating their account. If the name of the influential artist has already been entered, the UID of that artist will be entered as a reference in the table. If the influential artist has not been registered into the system, a temporary identifier (TID) will be assigned to represent that artist. If that artist is officially registered into the system at a later point, they will be assigned a UID as well.

I’m not a database expert but I think this structure could work. We will be talking to some experts in the field to get more insight. Any readers are welcome to advise us in this process.