Arches began as a project by the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund to create geospatially-enabled immovable heritage inventory software for cultural heritage organizations worldwide. In order to serve that goal and solve the problems often encountered by these organizations, one of the project’s design principles was that the system be as flexible and customizable as possible in order to adapt to different use cases worldwide. With the recent release of Arches Version 4, the platform has adopted a more modular system architecture with new features that make customization more accessible and new uses possible. For example, Arches v4 features an embedded map and tile server that gives organizations the ability to directly host their own map and satellite imagery tiles within Arches. The Arches Designer in Version 4 enables the dynamic creation of database schema using the platform’s interface. Specifically, the system’s data model can be defined with semantic metadata encoded (using an ontology, such as the CIDOC CRM), and data entry forms and reports can be specified based on that data model. In addition, other existing Arches features have been enhanced such as the geospatial and search interfaces and the Reference Data Manager, for managing controlled vocabularies. This paper will explore these features and as a result, how Arches v4 can accommodate archaeological datasets and also integrate them with other types of cultural heritage data.
Full title: The Arches Cultural Heritage Data Management Platform: A flexible and expandable open source system for cultural heritage inventories and beyond
(Annabel Lee Enriquez, Alison Dalgity, Dennis Wuthrich)
