Presenter
Baptiste de Coulon (@Baptiste_de_Coulon), Thomas Francart @tfrancart
Slides and Recordings
- Slides: SWIB_2025_SAPA.pdf (1.7 MB)
- Recordings: YouTube
Abstract
What benefits can a small institution without an IT department derive from a LOD project? We would like to present the example of Swiss Performing Arts Platform managed by the SAPA Foundation, Swiss Archive of the Performing Arts but manage with the help of external teams such as the Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (Switzerland) and Sparna (France) .
In 2017, the SAPA Foundation chose to adopt a data-centric (rather than application-centric) strategy for managing its collections. It has therefore migrated the metadata on its collections to an RDF knowledge graph, based in particular on the Records in Contexts Ontology (RiC-O). An ongoing matching effort enables authority records to be linked with external repositories (in particular Wikidata). SHACL documentation is also available.
Efforts have been made in recent years to use free softwares (Metaphactory GLAM community, ResearchSpace, QLever, Sparnatural).
The main difficulty encountered was having to design a complete tool dedicated to archive management on our own. The other difficulty, of course, was the transition to a standardised and documented data model.
The main results of this strategy are the continuous improvement of data quality and the facilitated development of exploration tools (https://vocab.performing-arts.ch, https://tls.performing-arts.ch) and queries (advanced search form). These unspectacular aspects guarantee three fundamental things: accurate, qualitative and interoperable data on a large scale, independence from software solutions, and an increase in information literacy within teams. Benefits that we believe will be decisive in the long term.