Linked Open Exhibitions

A Curator’s Playbook

Authors
Affiliations

Simon Worthington

HsH

TIB

Chloë Farr

University of Victoria

Published

June 18, 2026 00:00

Abstract

Catalogue exhibition contents using Linked Open Data and AI LLM assistants.

Keywords

Data Science, GLAM, Open Science

About this project (Sprengel Museum Hannover — Prototype)

CC BY-SA 4.0

Agentic coding assistant: Copilot (Claude Sonnet 4.6) — commit: 479fc85

This site presents a prototype pipeline for publishing art exhibition data as Linked Open Data (LOD). It was created with students of the Bachelor of Arts Information Management at Hochschule Hannover in the course BIM-126-02 Data Science (SoSe 2026).

Goal: Retrieve exhibition catalogue records from the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB), structure them using an open data model, upload them to a Wikibase knowledge base, and publish the results as a Quarto website — all reproducibly and with full documentation.

OA Week 2026 prototype

Catalogue of works by the artists John Baldessari shown in an art exhibition at the Sprengel Museum Hannover 26.9.1999 - 2.1.2000. The purpose of the prototype is to demonstrate how to catalogue artworks in an exhibition as Linked Open Data on Wikidata. In this instance an OCR scan is transfered to Wikidata and then ouput as a computationally reproducible Quarto publication.

Exhibition title: ‘while something is happening here, something else is happening there ; works 1988 - 1999’ ; Spectrum - Internationaler Preis für Fotografie der Stiftung Niedersachsen

Location:

Sprengel-Museum Hannover, 26.9.1999 - 2.1.2000.

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, 15.1. - 2.4.2000.

Sprengel Museum website: https://www.sprengel-museum.de/ausstellungen/archiv

Exhibition information (DNB publication record) is included for reference. https://d-nb.info/957409494 ISBN 978-3-88375-396-6.

The pipeline

DNB SRU API → MARC21-XML → CSV → Wikibase → SPARQL → Quarto website
Step Notebook Output
1. Retrieve DNB records 01_dnb_search.ipynb sprengel_raw.xml
2. Filter & extract fields 02_dnb_filter_exhibitions.ipynb sprengel_exhibitions.csv
3. Fetch cover images 03_dnb_cover_images.ipynb images/*.jpg
4. Upload data model 04_wikibase_data_model.ipynb Wikibase properties
5. Upload exhibitions 05_wikibase_upload.ipynb Wikibase items
6. Upload images 06_mediawiki_upload.ipynb MediaWiki files
7. Test SPARQL 00_sparql_health_check.ipynb SPARQL test
8. Test bot 00_wikibase_bot_test.ipynb bot test

Explore

  • Exhibitions → — browse the Sprengel Museum exhibition timeline, powered by live SPARQL queries
  • Data Analysis → — explore the full pipeline and dataset
  • About → — licences, credits, and AI attribution

Course & resources

Wikidata exhibition timeline

Live query against Wikidata for Sprengel Museum exhibitions entered by students in Sessions 1–3: