Digital art posterity: building a data model for digital art corpora

The research project “Digital art and posterity”, February 2015- February 2018, aims to contribute to perpetuating digital artistic heritage by developing a general descriptive system of digital works of art which provides a way to model the technical and artistic characteristics of the work, its significant properties and its formal principles in text form. This research is performed in collaboration between three institutions: the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF), the INRéV laboratory of Paris 8 University and the Living Art Lab. The partners come from different fields — those of conservation, of artistic creation and of academic research — and combine their skills and experiences to devise a conceptual model and a data model true to the specificities of the project’s corpora. This paper presents the main attributes of the proposed information model and ontology, so that all institutions involved in the collection, preservation and diffusion of digital art can provide input regarding its pertinence and interoperability