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Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI)

Swiss Performing Arts Platform

  • example_Noemi_Lapzeson_3

    Entry on the dancer and choreographer Noemi Lapzeson

    Overview of the entry with biographical information and links to external platforms such as Wikidata.

  • example_Noemi_Lapzeson_1

    Entry on the dancer and choreographer Noemi Lapzeson

    Overview of the RDF statements that describe the relations between the various entities.

  • example_Noemi_Lapzeson_2

    Entry on the dancer and choreographer Noemi Lapzeson

    RDF statements shown in a visual network.

The SAPA Foundation, Swiss Archive of Performing Arts, is dedicated to the documentation of the history of performing arts and to make it accessible to a wider audience. SAPA collects works in the field of performing arts (dance, theatre, performance) that have been produced in Switzerland, are related to Switzerland, or are significant for Switzerland. 

SAPA's collection not only consists of physical items, but also of conceptual works, activities, performances, places, people, and other entities relevant to the area of performing arts. Documenting such diverse and interconnected material digitally is a challenge for most collections management systems. Therefore SAPA focussed early on semantic knowledge graph technologies for documenting their collection and the performing arts landscape of Switzerland.

When we began our collaboration, SAPA already had a collections management and publishing platform in place, custom built using the Metaphactory platform. However, the platform grew too complex to maintain in-house. In addition, it was built on a commercial platform, for which yearly license fees were due.

We therefore first migrated the Swiss Performing Art Platform to Metaphacts Community, an open source version of the Metaphactory platform that we at Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI) have been developing further, streamlining some aspects of the platform to allow more rapid implementation of new features. This enabled us to collaborate with SAPA on the implementation of long needed features and other capabilities to facilitate the detailed cataloguing of their growing collection. 

In the foreseeable future standardised collections management system that support capturing detailed research data as Linked Open Data will become available and maintaining a custom-made platform will no longer be necessary for SAPA. Once that moment comes, we will help SAPA with migrating their existing data on to a new platform. 

The project is generously funded by SAPA Foundation. 

 

Author: Florian Kräutli