Development of a domain model and ontology for the Arts.

In September 2012 I undertook a project with Unthinkable Consulting who were working with the Barbican to develop a new digital strategy. A key component of that strategy was to be the creation of a rich domain model to describe the Barbican’s assets and activities. The model is intended to be a key component of a future digital presence for the Barbican.

The process of developing the domain model involved a series of workshops which brought together domain experts from across the entire organisation. The workshops had several goals:

• Introducing the concept of domain modelling and “graph thinking” to the domain experts
• Knowledge capture from groups of domain experts in specific fields, e.g. Arts, Theatre, Dance, Cinema, and Creative Learning
• Knowledge sharing to identify similarities, differences and points of connection between domains

These workshops were supplemented with additional review of Barbican information resources, and research of existing ontologies covering related areas.

The key deliverables for the project were:

• An Arts Ontology capable of capturing data from all areas of activity in the Barbican
• Detailed documentation for the model containing a number of real-world examples from across all of the Barbican’s domains
• Proof-of-concept wireframes that provided a tangible example of how the ontology could be applied to create a richly navigable website