Standards & Interoperability

One of the key principles in designing Arches has been the consultation and incorporation of internationally adopted standards for information technology, heritage inventory, and heritage data management. The incorporation of such standards has aided in the creation of a generic system for heritage inventory and management anywhere in the world and promotes sharing and longevity of data regardless of inevitable technological advances.

 

Information Technology

Arches implements key web and geospatial technology standards. To support geospatial data interoperability, Arches supports OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standards such as the Simple Features for SQL Types and Functions specification. In addition, Arches supports emerging geospatial data formats such as GeoJSON as well as web formats (KML) and traditional GIS data formats (shapefile). Arches is designed to seamlessly integrate with GeoServer to support publishing cultural heritage data as OGC web services that may be consumed with GIS applications such as ArcGIS or QGIS.

Arches’ system architecture is thoroughly modern, using RESTful interfaces and a MVC pattern to separate information representation and rendering concerns. Arches is built on python and django and implements the following core libraries: Require.js, Backbone.js, jQuery, and Bootstrap.

To support rapid retrieval of data, Arches incorporates ElasticSearch analytics and search engine to index essential information such as concepts and resource graph data.

 

CIDOC CRM

The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) is an ontology for cultural heritage that has been developed continuously since 1996 by the CRM Special Interest Group of the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). As a carefully constructed ontology, the CRM aims to provide ways to represent all possible concepts and relationships between concepts in the cultural heritage domain. This allows disparate and localized information to be described in a way that can be commonly understood. This potential has been realized extensively, as a large number of data structures that are maintained by institutions around the world have already been mapped to the CRM. In 2006 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted it as standard ISO 21127:2014 (“Information and Documentation: A Reference Ontology for the Interchange of Cultural Heritage Information”).

Use of this model adds meaning to data behind the scenes, creating self-describing data, which can then be understood independent of the software (in this case, Arches). Traditional databases usually rely on implicit conventions and external knowledge. And, by enriching data with semantic content, the CRM allows for new pieces of knowledge to be inferred, and it provides for a powerful way of searching within, as well as across, databases. These benefits of the CRM also contribute towards easier data migration to newer systems in the future, and, more generally, to data accessibility and preservation over time.

The CRM was initially created as a tool for museums, libraries, and archives, but it is also applicable to the domain of immovable cultural heritage. Arches incorporates default mappings of its core data structure to CRM classes and properties. This will ease integration between Arches and other systems compatible with the CRM, between separate implementations of Arches, and between related information management systems. Users of Arches will be able to customize and extend these mappings, and to share them with the Arches community.

Read the latest published version of the CIDOC CRM, available in different formats. A multimedia tutorial on the principles, the structure, and the application of the CRM is also available.

 

Heritage Inventory Standards

Growing out of best practices in heritage documentation in a number of countries, particularly in Europe, a set of standards has been developed for the inventory of archaeological, architectural, as well as movable cultural heritage. These standards took form after a multi-year conversation about the inventory of heritage places and have represented an important milestone since their completion. Their goal has been to identify those “core,” or essential, items of information that should form a part of any cultural heritage inventory.

CIDOC is now finalizing an international standard for the inventory of archaeological and architectural heritage known as the International Core Data Standard for Archaeological and Architectural Heritage, through the input of the ICOMOS International Documentation Committee (CIPA). It is based on the earlier Core Data Index to Historic Buildings and Monuments of the Architectural Heritage adopted by the Council of Europe in 1992, and the Core Data Standard for Archaeological Sites and Monuments, which resulted from collaboration between CIDOC and the Council of Europe and was adopted in 1995. Both of these earlier standards are available online.

For the Arches project, the International Core Data Standard for Archaeological and Architectural Heritage was used as the basis for selecting data fields for version 1.0 of the system. These data fields have been extended in subsequent software releases and through input of Arches implementations. This has included incorporation of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (ISO Standard 15836-2009) for describing Arches Information Resources, which may include digital files (e.g., JPG, PDF) and analog information carriers (e.g., images, documents).

View a paper by members of the Arches project team presented at the CIDOC 2014 Conference, Dresden, Germany, 6-11 September 2014: The Arches Heritage Inventory and Management System: A Standards-Based Approach to the Management of Cultural Heritage Information

 

Last updated:  August 2020