Building a Semantic Knowledge-base for Painting Conservators

The Twentieth Century Paint project is a collaboration between the Asia Pacific Twentieth Century Conservation Art Research Network (APTCCARN) and the eResearch Lab at the University of Queensland. It is a collaborative effort to explore the preservation of twentieth-century paintings in Asia and the Pacific. One of the key objectives is to establish an online knowledge-base that will provide conservators with access to integrated, structured information and a portfolio of experiments and case studies that document the different causes of paint degradation and the optimum conservation treatments. This paper describes the knowledge-base and the associated ontology and services developed by the eResearch Lab in collaboration with APTCCARN. This work provides a flexible but robust framework that will enable future expansion of the knowledge base through both harvesting of structured data and collaborative input by domain experts.