Metadata and art may not be bedfellows but they do have more in common than one would think. This interesting information came from Fast & Company in their article, “By Harnessing Data, Artsy Hopes To Democratize The Art World.”
The digital Art Genome Project wanted to help collectors of all means better navigate the art market with supercharged metadata. The result? Artsy – likely the biggest online database of art in the world, with more than 800,000 works and 70,000 artists represented. All powered by a classification system similar to the one behind Pandora Internet Radio.
Starting with very little metadata for cataloging artwork, they assigned values for a variety of categories to build a database. Fast forward ten years, and the project has transformed how people learn about art. Taking it one step further, Artsy is training computer models to help them tag more works to keep adding to the database.
How the content is classified impacts the findability of data. For projects like these, professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI-compliant.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
