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linked-art / linked.art

Development of a specification for linked data in museums, using existing ontologies and frameworks to build usable, understandable APIs
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Optionally record the names of constituents as they were at the time of provenance activities #387

Open beaudet opened 3 years ago

beaudet commented 3 years ago

The NGA has data stored in TMS provenance records that records the name of a constituent (specifically pointing to one of the alternative names for constituents I believe) that records the name the constituent was using at the time of the provenance activity.

The specific use case is that we have two works from an artist that were acquired by the artist from their gallery in say, 1930. The artist later changed their name and then more works were acquired by that artist in 1940. The NGA then acquired all works much later. So, the provenance history should reflect the names the constituent was using at the time of the custody change.

The linked art model current supports this a little via the attribution, but, since attributions can change over time (and probably for other reasons such as better modeling of the data in general), it seems like we should have a way to link the provenance event to a specific name used by the artist. There are probably dates associated with these alternative names as well and while a date calculation on the alternative names in the context of the provenance activity might be sufficient for resolving the proper name, it seems like a more explicit assignment would be best.

Should there be a way to model this scenario using Linked Art and if so, what shall it be?

azaroth42 commented 3 years ago

This seems useful, but complex as it revolves around what we call a Phase -- the temporal "validity" of a property, or the timespan during which a particular assertion is understood to be correct. We can assert multiple names for a person, but we don't have a way to give the timespan during which that was their legal or preferred name. We also don't deal with multiple concurrent pseudonyms being used in different contexts. It's different from the exhibition title, where we can assign the title as part of the exhibition, as the name of the person isn't specific to a particular event.

For now, this level of specificity probably needs to live in text descriptions but we should discuss possible solutions. Related to #180

azaroth42 commented 3 years ago

Propose defer?

beaudet commented 3 years ago

I'm ok with deferring for now but good to keep in mind as the standard evolves.