Context
The Getty, based in Los Angeles, is a unique cultural institution, combining an art museum, library, archive, foundation, and conservation science program. Shared across all of these is a deep commitment to creating, managing, and sharing knowledge of the visual arts—as well as building the cultural heritage field's capacity to work with this information.
What we have done
Over the past decade, Getty has implemented the infrastructure and practices needed to unify its archival, museum, research, and imaging data by applying semantic technologies. Some of the work has been technical–building models, setting up infrastructure, developing taxonomies, and leveraging standards. But far more important are the social processes that enable the technology: building the internal capacity needed to execute this work and the willingness to look beyond disciplinary practice and consider what it really means to connect knowledge across an institution's many centers of excellence.
What we have learned
- The challenges involved in bringing together all the different strands of knowledge.
- How you prevent the technology getting ahead of the capacity of the humans generating the knowledge.
- How you find that sweet spot between representing the world's true complexity and building something impenetrable to the very audience you hope to serve.