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Starting point
The Casa de la Arquitectura's web project aims to deliver a new online experience that allows visitors and users to explore Spanish architecture in an engaging, rich and personalised way. At launch, it covers Spanish architecture from the 20th and 21st centuries, with works spanning from 1920 to the present day.
Solution overview
The Casa de la Arquitectura's digital project is underpinned by advanced Neurosymbolic AI technology, built on a semantic model that represents information in a way machines can understand. The technology serves a digital experience that brings together information, publishing, navigation, search, contextualisation and architectural knowledge discovery.
This is a new way of presenting architecture in the digital environment — one that aims to offer users a visiting experience that goes well beyond what a physical museum can provide, given the very nature of architectural works: located by definition in different places across the world, and of dimensions that no museum building could ever contain. Users can visit and explore architectural works across time and space, navigate and discover connected information about architects, practices, buildings and awards, follow itineraries and explore whatever interests them most in a personalised, intuitive and accessible way. The platform enables the discovery of connected, enriched information through informational contexts, with a range of graphical presentation options including maps and timelines.
Technology overview
The knowledge graph
Casa de la Arquitectura on the Web takes visitors into a rich technological environment designed to deliver a superior online experience, built on a modular structure that allows architectural works (over 3,700 at launch) and architects or practices (over 4,300) to be interrelated with other bodies of architectural knowledge — including biennials, events, awards and documents.
The project builds a knowledge base that draws on and extends existing information sources such as Docomomo. Notably, it has created the first archive of architecture biennials, made publicly accessible in a straightforward way, presenting each edition and connecting it to related information about works and architects.
The site represents the first deployment of a Knowledge Graph developed by MITMA, achieved by integrating semantic web principles with the data gathered by the institution — both from architects and practices themselves and from other sources. This new approach to structuring data semantically has enabled one of the project's most significant contributions: the metasearch engine and faceted search tool. Through this powerful new search capability, users can for the first time access all the information held on the platform by applying their own personal sequences of reasoning and enquiry. Content recommendation systems, also a product of this data structuring, make it easier to go deeper into the information sought, drawing on comprehensive tagging of works, architects, news and events.
Beyond its public-facing use, the knowledge graph is used to annotate, organise and present the museum's information in a meaningfully relevant way — gathering into each work's record, for example, all related information regardless of its source or the team that generated it, along with its relationships to other works and the architect's connections to other architects represented in the collection.
The Encyclopaedia and the Timeline
Architectural works, architects and architecture practices are also showcased in an Encyclopaedia presented as a multi-layered timeline, which frames and expands the Casa de la Arquitectura collection to deepen the understanding of architecture in context. This tool allows users to discover, for example, which works belong to the same period, what historical events were unfolding when a particular building was constructed, or which contemporaneous international works were being created at the same time.
The encyclopaedia has been built from information held in the knowledge graph, enriched with structured data from external sources — specifically Wikidata and Wikipedia — with the aim of providing context for the works, architects and practices it covers. That context spans architectural movements and styles, events and awards, culture, politics, conflicts and other significant moments in history. The encyclopaedia's configuration tool allows users to set up to three distinct layers — one of which is always "Spanish Architecture" — and to choose which types of entities to display in each layer. The encyclopaedia contains approximately 15,000 entities, offering a broad contextual backdrop for the works and the architects behind them.
Impact
The Casa de la Arquitectura Knowledge Graph has been built on semantic web standards and in accordance with the principles of the Linked Data Web, enabling it to:
- Contribute to building a rich knowledge base of Spanish architecture, shaped by contributions from practices and architects as well as the integration of information from a range of heterogeneous and distributed sources.
- Optimise the use of that knowledge base, bringing out the full value of work carried out across all areas of the institution.
- Move from a document-based web model to a Knowledge Graph expressed through a Linked Data Web — in this case centred on the world of architecture.
- Develop querying and visualisation modes for that graph tailored to different audiences, designed to maximise the satisfaction of their interests by surfacing data explicitly related to the results that answer their questions.
- Build thematic web pages based on a dataset or subgraph meeting specific criteria (Semantic Dynamic Publishing).
The result is a large knowledge graph with the collection's entities at its core: a queryable graph that interconnects all resources and makes it easy for users to retrieve them according to any interest or intent, share them and group them. It is an intelligent graph through which users can travel, which they can interrogate, and which is capable of inferring from user requests and proposing new architectural narratives and journeys.