From the Wall to the Web: A Microformat for Visual Art

Art museums are increasingly displaying and interpreting their collections online but adding semantics to the works of art on the web is complex and problematic. A microformat for visual art can facilitate the adoption of semantic technologies of the web and facilitate basic problems of data transfer and search. Before it becomes possible to describe the semantics of the entire web with technologies such as RDF, there are benefits to be reaped by describing artwork labels on the web in a way that is machine-processable but designed for human use first.

This web site documents the labeling practices across four museums:

Wall examples section documents the labeling practices inside respective museums. Web examples section documents the labeling practices of respective museums on the web.

Concepts section demonstrates how the proposed Visual Art microformat could be implemented on web pages and contains concept videos of what extraction interfaces for the proposed microformat might look like.