Ontologies for Knowledge and Art in the Making: The Re-Source Project

• In Event: Schemas, Graphs, Ontologies - II

Abstract

Re-Source is a digital platform built for Lafayette Anticipation (Galeries Lafayette corporate foundation). Conceived as its extension, the project’s main purpose was to open the black box of contemporary art, not unlike laboratory studies back in the 70s and 80s.

A semantic archive, Re-Source helps to record and index data produced by team members of the Foundation on a daily basis (before that the team used a Google Drive). From the archived material, another understanding of art, concerned with the hidden work of many actors often left in the background may comes to the forefront. Artworks are no longer taken to be the result of an artist’s genius but rather the combined, uncertain, effort of a multitude of actors. As decisions and judgments become apparent and discussable, what makes art “autonomous”, once understood as the norms one chooses to adopt, can be publicized and shared with an audience.

Doing so requires devising a shared vocabulary between all the parties involved : the curators, producers, administrators and artists among others. We shall see that the choice was made to produce a new vocabulary from scratch instead of tapping into the existing set of RDF ontologies available to describe either artworks or "works" in general (like FRBR or Cidoc CRM). Devising an ontology may be thought of as an organization-wide reflexive process. In this case, it was left incomplete and we will examine why, reflecting on the difficulty of writing and adopting custom-made vocabularies.

Author

• Alexandre Monnin, ESC-Clermont, Origens Medialab