The Zeri Photo Archive to Linked Open Data
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Ontologies and controlled vocabularies
References to documentation and bibliography
The Zeri Photo Archive to Linked Open Data
The Federico Zeri Foundation was set up in 1999 by the University of Bologna with the aim of valorizing the life-work and profile of Federico Zeri, as well as preserving his bequest and turning it to best account: an Art Library (46,000 volumes, 37,000 auction catalogs, 60 periodicals) and a Photo Archive (290,000 photographs of monuments and artworks).
Among the activities of its first years, the Zeri Foundation undertook the cataloguing of Zeri’s repository, employing to that end two Italian metadata content standards, Scheda F, for Scheda di fotografia (photograph)and Scheda OA, for Scheda Opera d’Arte (work of art), both issued by the ICCD (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, Central Institute for the Cataloguing and Documentation) of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage. The effort in cataloguing Zeri’s collection compliantly with these two Italian standards has resulted in the Zeri Photo Archive catalog.
A considerable challenge, but primarily a commitment to open this priceless heritage to as wide public as possible, especially young scholars engaged in Art History studies, today involves investing in digital technology and online research access to resources, which has proved a winning strategy.
Now, by sharing these collections in a machine-readable format we hope to make our artworks and photographs more findable, and promote a creative re-use of our data in search and other applications.
The first release of the Zeri Photo Archive RDF dataset (April, 2016) represents a considerable subset of data already available at the Zeri Catalog web site and discoverable through the Europeana Portal.
Data mostly regard artworks of Modern Art (15th-16th centuries): about 19.000 works of art and more than 30.000 photographs depicting such works are accurately described by means of like 11 million of RDF statements.
The need of Linked Open Data creation has been addressed in the context of a particular project, PHAROS: An International Consortium of Photo Archives, one of the first concrete steps towards the creation of an actual digital infrastructure of the notable photographic archives of works of art in Europe and the United States of America. The Consortium enables the active collaboration between the institutions responsible for fourteen photo archives, so as to create a common platform for research on images and metadata of Western and non-Western works of art in all media.
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Please note that only the metadata fall under the license Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0); images are not included, and their use is subject to a specific licensing (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Give a proper attribution by including the statement “Fondazione Federico Zeri, Zeri Photo Archive, RDF Dataset. 1.0. 2016. Distributed by CRR-MM. http://w3id.org/zericatalog”.
Access data and connect your application to our SPARQL endpoint or use the web interface to directly query it.
The last version of the RDF dataset can be downloaded at the University of Bologna data repository AMSActa: DOI:10.6092/unibo/amsacta/5157
Users can directly browse data by using an RDF browser (LodView) and then discover new information by following links to external resources. To enable different approaches in consuming data, each IRI representing a catalog entry is linked to the HTML visualization in the current Zeri catalog.
To start browsing data in LodView: the Zeri Photo Archive Collection; a photograph and the F entry describing the photograph.
To facilitate users and developers to reuse data, here below is reported the schema adopted for creating URIs.
base: https://w3id.org/zericatalog/
oaentry: [base]oaentry/[NCTN] *
oaentry expression: [base]oaentry/[NCTN]/expression-[n]
fentry: [base]fentry/[NCTN]
fentry expression: [base]fentry/[NCTN]/expression-[n]
artwork: [base]artwork/[artworkid] *
artwork manifestation: [base]artwork/[artworkid]/manifestation
artwork item: [base]artwork/[artworkid]/item
photograph: [base]photo/[photoid]
photograph expression: [base]photo/[photoid]/shot
m-type: positive, negative, digital-image, unicum, slide
photograph manifestation: [base]photo/[photoid]/[m-type]
photograph item: [base]photo/[photoid]/[m-type]/item-fz
photograph digital item: http://catalogo.fondazionezeri.unibo.it/foto/[digid].jpg
person: [base]person/[persid]/[persname] *
organization: [base]organization/[orgid]/[orgname]
place: [base]place/[placename]
date: [base]date/[time-span]
bibliographic work: [base]work/[bibid]
archival source: [base][sourcetype]/[sourceid]
* authority record control numbers assigned by the Zeri Foundation.
With the use of the W3C standards RDF and SPARQL, linked open data gives researchers and developers outside the Archive the ability to develop alternative applications.
Ontologies and controlled vocabularies
The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM) was used to represent the richness of Zeri Photo Archive. Whenever a straightforward reuse was not possible, terms from other ontologies have been reused. The SPAR Ontologies are used to describe all the documents in FRBR terms and to relate them in a meaningful way. The HiCO Ontology, was used for defining provenance of questionable metadata, e.g. a cataloguer's authorship attribution.
All the terms required for the description are provided in two ad hoc ontologies: FEntry Ontology and OAEntry Ontology. The aim is to reach a comprehensive representation of the two Italian content standards Scheda OA and Scheda F adopted by the Federico Zeri Foundation when cataloguing photographs.
Terms describing typologies of artworks and photographs, materials and techniques of execution are aligned to the AAT Getty Thesaurus by using rdfs:seeAlso.
People (mainly artists) are linked, as much as possible, to VIAF and Getty ULAN authority records, and to DBpedia and Wikidata individuals, by means of the property owl:sameAs; places are linked to related geoNames individuals, by using the property owl:sameAs.
References to documentation and bibliography
Two documents, exemplifying the mappings and alignments from Scheda OA and Scheda F to CIDOC-CRM and other ontologies, provide a complete representation of the description requirements for photographs and works of art. Each document is accompanied by an exemplar of usage (RDF/ttl).
Mapping OA to RDF document and related RDF/ttl example. Mapping F to RDF document and related RDF/ttl example.
A first introduction of the Zeri & LODE project:
Ciro Mattia Gonano, Francesca Mambelli, Silvio Peroni, Francesca Tomasi and Fabio Vitali. 2014. Zeri e LODE: Extracting the Zeri photo archive to linked open data: formalizing the conceptual model. In Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014). IEEE, Washington, 289–298. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JCDL.2014.6970182
A revision of the former article, describing current state of the project:
Marilena Daquino, Francesca Mambelli, Silvio Peroni, Francesca Tomasi, Fabio Vitali. 2016. Enhancing semantic expressivity in the cultural heritage domain: exposing the Zeri Photo Archive as Linked Open Data. arXiv.org. arXiv:1605.01188
The SAMOD methodology for ontology development:
Silvio Peroni. 2016. SAMOD: an agile methodology for the development of ontologies. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3189769
The SPAR Ontologies:
Silvio Peroni and David Shotton. 2012. FaBiO and CiTO: ontologies for describing bibliographic resources and citations. Journal of Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 17 (December 2012), 33–43. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2012.08.001
Silvio Peroni, David Shotton and Fabio Vitali. 2012. Scholarly publishing and the Linked Data: describing roles, statuses, temporal and contextual extents. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Semantic Systems (i-Semantics 2012). Eds. Harald Sack and Tassilio Pellegrini, 9–16. ACM, New York. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2362499.2362502
The HiCO Ontology:
Marilena Daquino and Francesca Tomasi. 2015. Historical Context (HiCO): a conceptual model for describing context information of cultural heritage objects. In Metadata and Semantics Research, Communication in Computer and Information Science 544, Eds. Emmanouel Garoufallou, Richard J. Hartley and Panorea Gaitanou, 424–436. Springer, Cham. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24129-6_37
A poster describing tha aims of the Zeri & LODE project
Marilena Daquino. 2016. The Zeri & LODE project presentation. figshare.https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3456860.v4
Presentation slides (in italian):
Marilena Daquino and Francesca Mambelli. 2016. Zeri & LODE. Il catalogo della Fondazione Zeri a 5 stelle. figshare.https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3848226