Johannes Itten Linked Archive (JILA)

Visualization of Itten's Italy trip

People, places, objects and documents in Johannes Itten's diary of his trip to Italy, visualized in Johannes Itten Linked Archive. Source: SARI
Portrait of the "Beautiful Citizen"

Image from Itten's Italy trip diary. It shows an unknown woman, whom Itten sketched during his trip. Source: Zentralbibliothek Zürich

The Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI), in close collaboration with the archive of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Zurich’s Central Library, developed the Johannes Itten Linked Archive (JILA), a linked open data knowledge platform on Swiss artist, art theorist and educator Johannes Itten (1888- 1967). The collaboration is part of the initiative “Itten vernetzt” at the Zurich Central Library.

SARI developed models and ingest processes for editing, semantic enrichment and preparation of catalogue and metadata (from the Itten archive and the digitisation platform e-manuscripta) using its semantic web-based technology stack. This includes incorporating linked data from the digital catalogue raisonné of Johannes Itten (University of Regensburg / Heidelberg University) that is due to be published soon.

The collaboration’s objective is to visualise and research the Johannes Itten Archive at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich. The research portal presents and enables research on complex references both within the Itten archive at the Zurich Central Library and in the context of the international research environment. For this purpose, SARI delivers semantic modelling and image publication processes and ensures that reference data (on people, works, institutions, etc.) can be reconciled alongside metadata. Selected tools and applications have been implemented to allow researchers to enrich published data with information continuously.

This project is generously funded by Zentralbibliothek Zurich