Bilder der Schweiz Online / Images of Switzerland Online

Overview

Archive Crowdsourcing / Citizens’ science Digital Humanities Drawings, prints, and other pictorial sources Urban History Social Network Analysis Platform for data aggregation or retrieval Photos Persons data GIS / HGIS Apps / Interfaces for data visualization Education / pedagogy Geohistory Knowledge Graph Linked Data Machine Learning Library Natural language processing (NLP) Tools for data enrichment

The project “Bilder der Schweiz Online” (BSO) (Images of Switzerland Online) is developed as a collaboration between the Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI) and the Chair of Modern Art History at the University of Zurich (UZH). They are jointly creating an online portal to research and present the historical view on Switzerland as it appeared in topographic art (drawings, prints) and photography from the 18th to the early 20th century. The declared aim is the scientific and, at the same time, engaging public presentation of the views of “Schweizer Kleinmeister” (Swiss minor masters) from important museum and library holdings. The portal is intended to provide various sources of knowledge about Helvetica in digital form. This includes collections and museum holdings of paintings, drawings, and prints, as well as source literature, travel guides, materials on tourism, artistic production, printing, and distribution, as well as reception and collection history.

In the context of the research project, SARI, as the Lead Partner of the project within TMO, is developing tailored semantic models and ontologies for the representation of complex relationships with regards to collection, (art) history, and topography. Based on collections data from the Stiftung Familie Fehlmann (Fehlmann Family Foundation) (private collection), the Zurich Central Library (graphic collection), and the Swiss National Library (graphic collection), SARI develops and customises processes for editorial adjustment, transformation, and finally the publication of all relevant content as human and machine-readable semantic data (Knowledge Graph).
Specifically, SARI develops query and research environments that enable continuous scientific processing of historical materials and the publication of reference data (places, people, works, terms, etc.) as well as the further semantic enrichment of content from relevant data sources using digital methods (e.g. geo-spatial data from the Federal Office for Topography, content from library catalogues, etc.). Hereby, SARI employs state-of-the-art semantic web technologies and methods.

Project partners

With financial support by