Contemporary art is an intrinsic part of our cultural heritage.
Installations, performances, video and other forms of media art,
have the interest of a small
group of adherents, but are in comparison with more traditional
art forms, far more difficult to present to a general audience.
Another problem is that, due to the type of materials
used and the context-specific aspects of these art forms,
the conservation of the works is difficult and require of the conservator an intimate knowledge
of the original intentions of the artist as well as
details of the materials used and the procedure of construction.
For creating the digital dossier we developed a web-based content management tool to
generate the VRML structures needed for creating the concept graph and the content nodes.
We later extended this tool to
generates XML (eXtendible Markup Language) structured data which can be converted to
VRML or any other suitable format.
Digital dossiers provide an efficient means to present
cultural heritage on the web, including media-rich representations of
artworks as well as 3D models of artwork installations and
the information needed for understanding the artwork in the context
of its production and (re-)installation.
Digital dossiers provide support
for navigating the
information space by means of concept graphs.
Instead of presenting a complete view of the hierarchy,
the concept graph shows only a subset of the information, and allows
in this way for arbitrarily complex information structures.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the following people to the development of the digital dossier.
Students of the
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Tim Verweij, Olav van Zon, Eric de Boer, Pascal Snijders Blok, Olaf van Zon.
Students of the
Universiteit van Amsterdam, Abeer Mahdi, Jina Menke, Michela Negrini, and the
Technische Universiteit Delft, Jurgen Koster
From the
Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, Ijsbrand Hummelen
and from
Montevideo, Bart Rutten, Gaby Wijers.
