Data Modeling & Knowledge Graph Research
These visualizations were completed as part of my Master’s thesis, where I explored semantic knowledge graph database trends for linked open data (LOD) projects at cultural heritage institutions. Provenance research is identified as an area for the future expansion of LOD, aiming not only to uplift underrepresented histories but also to aid museums in their social responsibility and ethical goals. This study contributes to the discussion of open access to arts and humanities data and developed my skills in W3C standards related to ontologies (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SKOS, and SHACL).
To illustrate this, I discussed three examples of successful LOD projects — Europeana, the International Digital Dura-Europos Archive of the Yale University Art Gallery, and the American Art Collaborative. I then highlighted the case of the Benin Bronzes and the platform Digital Benin as an example of a project that would benefit from a LOD approach, modeling the provenance data connected to one work with the Linked Art Profile of the CIDOC CRM ontology. The data models represent the events of the theft of the work from the Kingdom of Benin, its acquisition and sale by Eduard Schmidt, then its acquisition by the Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.