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Starting point
The means chosen to achieve this was to represent that museum heritage through a queryable Knowledge Graph that connects the works of art and artists in its collection, enriching them with other knowledge assets held by the Museum, such as its encyclopaedia and archive.
And all of this — it is worth emphasising — with the aim of making it easier for everyone to retrieve information in line with their own interests and intentions, encouraging them to spend longer enjoying their visit.
This new way of being present on the web is, in short, an attempt to make more intensive and effective use of the knowledge base built from the institution's extraordinarily rich heritage. In taking this step, the goal has been to move towards building a more open and accessible museum — not simply to create a museum website.
In this sense, it is worth noting that this new web presence was conceived from the outset with the intention of using the Museum's data to improve its own documentation, editing, communications and publishing processes — not merely to represent that data in a reusable form for third parties.
Solution overview
The most significant and far-reaching outcome of this digital project has been the consolidation of a substantial portion of the Museum's content into a large, unified, extensible, expressive and queryable knowledge graph. Taking the collection's entities as its central node, it connects to them all the other knowledge objects that make up the museum's activity — a queryable graph that makes it easy for users to retrieve resources according to any interest or intent, share and group them, and ultimately create their own museum, their own view of it, their own curatorial narratives, itineraries and visits.
The Prado's knowledge graph brings together around 20,000 resources, 310,000 entities and approximately 2,830,000 relationships between those different objects and entities. These are used to understand the meaning behind the terms a user enters in a search, but also to offer a system for exploring the collection — and the museum's resources more broadly — through a faceted search engine, among other tools, giving users every possible mode of navigation across that body of entities.
The interlinking of the Museum's full body of works and artists within the semantically interpreted Knowledge Graph enables the following advanced applications:
Augmented reading of the collection
Understanding a work of art that is not contemporary often requires familiarity with a context far removed from today's audiences: mythological, religious, literary or philosophical references from antiquity that may feel alien to the modern visitor. The same applies to works that depict a historical event or reference a distant place.
The new evolution of the Prado on the web set out to make the museum's unstructured content intellectually more approachable and accessible. Perhaps the most significant of all is found in the often rich and sometimes complex descriptions of its works. Augmented Reading recognises and extracts the entities contained within them, providing additional contextual information so that anyone can read these texts without having to forgo a deeper understanding of them.
Augmented Reading automatically provides an explanatory context for the texts describing each work — under the necessary supervision and guarantee of the Museo del Prado — helping to turn them into didactic, learning-oriented texts.
Additionally, Augmented Reading enables a second, more technical level of application that improves documentation processes through a precise entity recognition and metadata workflow, enriching the description of each work and fostering the discovery of hidden connections.
Timeline
Is it possible to build a universal history or idea of art from this corner of the art world we know as the Museo del Prado?
In reality, everything is connected — and consequently, it is possible to construct narratives that highlight this quality of the real. The Museo Nacional del Prado holds a collection of extraordinary quality and singularity, one that reflects with great precision the particular tastes of the Spanish royal family, and in certain cases of the country's senior Church and aristocratic figures, from the 15th century through to the dawn of the 20th. In the final century represented in the collection, the 19th, those royal and aristocratic tastes gradually blend with more bourgeois sensibilities. In this sense, the museum shares with other great institutions — the National Gallery, the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Rijksmuseum, to name but a few — this essential quality of representing a certain identity, or of acting as its mirror in some way.
This project set out to provide the Prado's collection and artists with a broad, historical and interdisciplinary context that frames, explains and universalises them — a context that simultaneously allows the Prado and its collection to function as a gateway to knowledge as a whole, by being able to answer questions such as: what was Beethoven composing when Goya signed his final self-portrait? What was happening in France at that moment? What was Hegel writing around that time? Does it coincide with the independence of Peru? In short, the Prado can offer anyone who wishes it a genuine machine for studying, learning and building meaningful connections between the entities that populate the rich world of culture and history.
To build the Museo del Prado's Timeline, the museum's Knowledge Graph has been enriched with structured and unstructured information from other web sources — specifically Wikidata and Wikipedia — with the aim of providing historical context for the museum's works and artists from the 12th to the 19th century. This project is an application of the principles of the Linked Open Data Web. The Prado's Knowledge Graph is built on a set of hybridised ontologies and vocabularies constructed in accordance with Semantic Web standards, which makes it possible for the entities it handles — such as artists or dates — to find their counterparts in other datasets such as Wikidata or Wikipedia, querying them for data related to a particular year, for example.
Technology overview
Ontological model of the Museo Nacional del Prado
When we say it is a system that "understands", we mean a system written in a formal technical language that enables machines and systems to genuinely "comprehend" and correctly process the full set of entities described above — and in doing so, work alongside people in their processes of querying, information retrieval and knowledge discovery.
A domain ontology represents concepts belonging to a specific part of the world, and can therefore be considered as managing highly specialised knowledge. The primary ontology used in this project was the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), which, as stated on its own website, provides the descriptions and formal structure for describing the explicit and implicit concepts — and their relationships — used in the domain of cultural heritage documentation. In practice, this allows the core processes of the Museum to be represented adequately, with the necessary adjustments.
The Prado's digital model is organised, at its highest level, into around 20 Knowledge Objects, of which the following 16 are the most significant:
- KO Work of art
- KO Artist
- KO Exhibition
- KO Encyclopaedia entry
- KO Museum chronology event
- KO Activity
- KO Study/restoration
- KO Job vacancy
- KO Scholarship
- KO News item
- KO Media mention
- KO Multimedia resources (video, sign guide, audio, audio guide)
- KO Newsletter
- KO Social media post (Facebook and Twitter)
- KO Product
- KO Itinerary (My Prado)
All content on this site is represented and published in accordance with W3C standards for the semantic web and with the principles promoted by the Linking Open Data Project, with the aim of encouraging and facilitating the publication and interlinking of data on the web. As noted above, these semantic metadata generate a unified knowledge graph that is exploited primarily — though not exclusively — within the site itself, through its querying and recommendation systems, delivering an enhanced user experience.
Impact
For the user
- A more intuitive, intelligent, personalised and semantically meaningful browsing experience.
- Access to contextualised content that supports a deeper understanding of the works.
- The ability to create personal itineraries, collections and curatorial narratives.
- Access to a "learning machine" that connects art with other fields of knowledge.
- Augmented Reading available for 5,603 works in Spanish and 2,690 in English, covering more than 90% of the most frequently consulted works.
For the museum
- A significant transformation in the ways the institution's heritage and knowledge are produced and consumed.
- Improved documentation, editing, communications and publishing processes.
- Enriched artwork metadata through the incorporation of entities extracted from descriptive texts.
- Discovery of previously hidden connections between works and artists.
- The ability to develop advanced services for different user groups.
- Recognition through major international awards.
- The building of a more open and accessible museum — not simply a website.
