Data Standards for Interdisciplinary Exchange in Conservation-Restoration
Description
Until now, conservation work has been documented in a variety of formats with little standardisation. This lack of standardisation makes it difficult to trace treatment histories, facilitates (inter-)disciplinary data exchange, and thus hinders comparative research. Furthermore, the semantic ambiguity of the data impedes technically accurate interpretation and further processing, both by researchers and by machine-based systems.
The TRAIL project addresses these challenges by developing standardised formats that enable complex relationships within the field of conservation and restoration – for example, between observed damage patterns, the selection of the most appropriate conservation measure, and treatment outcomes or empirical findings – to be presented transparently and in a machine-readable format. On the one hand, this standardised recording of one’s own practice enables evidence-based self-reflection and the long-term identification of successful treatment strategies. On the other hand, integration into knowledge graphs opens up the possibility of interdisciplinary networking of conservation knowledge into wider contexts.
As part of the TRAIL project, a community-based metadata set is being (further) developed which identifies the core elements of good documentation whilst taking into account the diverse requirements of various conservation disciplines. Secondly, the technical implementation of this content-based documentation standard is being carried out through the development of an interoperable exchange format (LIDO-XML) and an application ontology based on the CIDOC CRM. The practical benefits are to be demonstrated through the exemplary application of the developed standards to previously unstructured datasets and the integration of this processed data into the N4O Knowledge Graph.
The aim of the TRAIL is to develop a community-based metadata schema for conservation and restoration documentation, as well as to model an XML exchange format and a corresponding application ontology.