Linked Open Data

The American Art Collaborative Linked Open Data Consortium

The American Art Collaborative (AAC) is a consortium of fourteen U.S. institutions—thirteen museums and one archive--working together to create a critical mass of Linked Open Data (LOD) around the subject of the visual arts in America.

The National Portrait Gallery has been a member of the AAC since the consortium’s formal establishment in 2014. For a full list of participating institutions, educational briefings, presentations, and general project background, visit AmericanArtCollaborative.org.

Thanks to generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the AAC has converted over 230,000 museum object records to LOD.

New to linked data? Please visit LinkedData.org.

View the Browse Application Prototype

To design and develop a usable application for exploring the collected data, the project established a Browse Working Group, involving six of the 14 institutions and led by Design for Context, who developed a demonstration application, available at browse.americanartcollaborative.org.

The site allows objects and artists from across the 14 partner institutions to be explored through one interface. This application is a prototype, and is not meant to represent all the things that can be done with museum data in the future. Rather, it provides easy access to the available partner information and focuses on a few straightforward ways that data from the different institutions can be connected and explored.

Using the AAC Data

The URI construction for SPARQL queries is data.americanartcollaborative.org/sparql. We invite developers to make use of this data in their applications and share their results with us. 

Connect to the Portrait Gallery’s artwork data using this URI schema: data.americanartcollaborative.org/npg/object/id/[object_number] Examplehttp://data.americanartcollaborative.org/page/npg/object/id/18133 

Metadata and LOD from the AAC partners is freely available on GitHub:

Licensing and Usage Guidelines for NPG Data

The National Portrait Gallery has licensed the use of our collections metadata under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). This license allows for re-use of the metadata without legal restriction. Please be aware that the content to which the metadata links is not covered by the CC0 license.

If you wish to use the underlying content for anything other than personal or non-commercial usage, please contact Rights and Reproductions staff.

The availability of a link to a digital resource does not imply or convey permission to download, distribute, or use that file in any way that would be incompatible with the Terms of Use of the Smithsonian Institution.

Additional guidelines:

  • Give proper attribution by including the statement “Data Source: National Portrait Gallery” and by providing the URI for the object being referenced.
  • Do not mislead others, or misrepresent the metadata or its sources.
  • Understand that data is used at your own risk.

AAC Next Steps

As a next step, the AAC is seeking additional funding to expand the application of LOD within the museum and archival communities. As more museums produce LOD, we hope they will contact us, dialogue will ensue, and opportunities will increase to link or interconnect data and further demonstrate the value of LOD.

Contact Us

For questions or feedback on the National Portrait Gallery’s data, please contact Data Administrator Sue Garton at gartons@si.edu.

For more information about AAC’s next steps, please contact AAC founder and manager Eleanor Fink at eleanorfink@earthlink.net.