CIDOC 2023 Convocatoria

Frontiers of knowledge.
Museums, documentation
and linked data

The organization and openness of knowledge are imperative tasks for museums and various cultural heritage institutions, directly connected to their documentation practices. This organization is carried out from different approaches and goals of institutional management: administrative, research, publication and dissemination, among others. The objectives generally aim for a better identification of heritage, the generation of inventories and catalogs for its conservation and exhibition; as well as databases, technological platforms and linked open data that allow its dissemination, use and redistribution to wider audiences. All these are borders, academic and institutional horizons that lead to documentation practices and knowledge integration results.

One of the most common frontiers is the one that focuses on access to information as the main goal. With this objective, the technological developments of information focus on the publication of different cultural products to integrate them into the digital world; with this, visibility is prioritized with data models that can leave aside the complexity and heterogeneity of sources produced by the scientific or academic observation.

Therefore, access should not be our only border. There are others related to better expressing the contextual and heterogeneous richness of heritage documentation, to optimize documentation processes, as well as advancing in the development of a better infrastructure that allows the adequate representation of knowledge. It is about creating keys that invite those who use them to follow the origin of data and amplify the content generated by the organizations with custody responsibility of cultural property.

These borders express a possible opportunity to question ourselves on the basis of under what objectives we propose the publication of digital content and what horizons remain to be achieved. In this sense, we invite to dialogue based on questions such as what are the frontiers of knowledge in the documentation of heritage assets? What frontiers have we reached and what new horizons can we consider?

To guide the conversation, we suggest the following topics:

• Strategies to reduce the digital gap between countries, institutions and people
• Institutional management and openness of knowledge: the importance of a comprehensive approach between institutional planning and the opening of knowledge (open science)
• Development of flexible information technologies focused on cultural heritage assets
• Collaboration for the development of thesauri and authority systems.
• Standard application to generate quality data and its linkage with international communities

• Documentation and teaching in museums
• Decolonization and documentation: online collections in the face of cultural debates on power relations
• Emerging initiatives of museum documentation
• Museums, documentation and attention to the public: mediation between disciplines and actors
• Controlled vocabularies, interoperability and knowledge organization systems
• New interdisciplinary approaches for museum research

• Cultural heritage standards
• Digital preservation
• Technological frontiers in the documentation of cultural heritage: management platforms, publication, use of artificial intelligence, among others
• Distributed open collaboration (crowdsourcing)