Open data dusts off the art world -- GCN

"Museums are finding ways to convert even the provenance of artwork into open data, offering an out-of-the-box lesson in accessibility to public sector agencies. The specific use case could be of interest to government as well -- many cities and states have sizeable art collections, and the General Services Administration owns more than 26,000 pieces.  Most art pieces have a few skeletons in their closet, or at least a backstory worthy of The History Channel. That provenance, or ownership information, has traditionally been stored in manila folders, only occasionally dusted off by art historians for academic papers or auction houses to verify authenticity. Many museums have some provenance data in collection management systems, but the narratives that tell the history of the work are often stored as semi-structured data, formatted according to the needs of individual institutions, making the information both hard to search and share across systems.    Enter Art Tracks from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) -- a new open source, open data initiative that aims to turn provenance in to structured data by building a suite of open source software tools so an artwork’s past can be available to museum goers, curators, researchers and software developers ..."