The graph effectively records all that may be asserted regarding a work: author, date, provenance, iconography, the various interpretations it has received, and the proponents thereof. At its most refined, it serves as an exhaustive map of what may be articulated concerning the piece. And that which may be articulated is substantial; it merits documentation. Yet, that which renders a work art is not a property inherent to it that one might record in a field, however precise. It is that which transpires when an individual encounters the work and something within their mode of perception is reorganised. This does not reside within the work as pigment or date do; it resides in the relationship between the work and the observer, and a relationship is not inscribed—it is either produced or it is not. The graph may preserve the fact that a painting moved generations; it cannot preserve the emotion itself, for the emotion is not an attribute of the painting, but an event that the painting facilitates.
My concern is not that the graph remains incomplete, as it invariably will be, but rather this: when that which fits within the graph begins to be valued more than that which does not. Every data structure makes choices. It determines what constitutes an entity, what constitutes a relationship, what merits its own field, and what remains unrecorded. These decisions are not neutral; those who work in the sector are acutely aware of this. A researcher in the field articulated it with precision: metadata does not speak for itself, and its structure, almost invariably invisible, determines what meaning may be extracted from it. The Getty thesauri themselves caution that they must be capable of accommodating the debated and ambiguous nature of information regarding art, rather than converting every dubious attribution into a fixed fact. This is a lucidity inherent to the field itself: the discipline understands that to codify is to decide.
The risk is not that the machine might misinterpret art. It is more subtle: that which does not lend itself to codification may gradually become invisible. That which lacks a field is not searched for, and that which is not searched for ceases to be found. If knowledge concerning art primarily circulates through these structures, that which they cannot accommodate—open interpretation, fertile disagreement, the actions a work performs that remain unarticulated—risks being treated as noise, as that which has yet to be formalised, rather than what it truly is: the living essence of the matter.
Let us not confuse the map with the territory. Above all, let us not neglect the territory because the map continues to improve. A knowledge graph is a magnificent instrument for ascertaining what is known about a work. Yet, what a work is, in the sense that concerns me, is not what is known of it: it is what it continues to perform each time someone stands before it. That does not fit into any node, not because it is sacred, but because it is not a thing. It is a relationship, and relationships are not stored. They are experienced, or they do not occur.
On the open conversation
This text examines a real and ongoing endeavour: the codification of knowledge about art into formal ontologies and graphs, using international models and projects that extend to formalising the creative process or iconographic interpretation. I am not opposed to this work, which is useful for research; I question what is stabilised when interpretation becomes a data structure, and what is left out. The distinction I propose, between what can be asserted about a work and what a work does before the viewer, stems from my research into recognition and surplus. If anyone wishes to intervene from the fields of digital humanities, heritage documentation, ontology engineering, or art history, this notebook remains open.
Sources
CIDOC CRM (ISO 21127:2023), a conceptual model for the integration of cultural heritage information, developed by the ICOM CIDOC.
Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI) and its Creative Process Representation Ontology (CPRo), for the modelling of creative processes.
ICON, an ontology for iconographic and iconological interpretation based on Panofsky's levels (Sartini et al.; Baroncini, Daquino and Tomasi, 2021).
Canning, Erin, et al. 'The Power to Structure: Making Meaning from Metadata Through Ontologies'. KULA, 2022.
Getty Vocabularies (Art & Architecture Thesaurus), regarding the debated and ambiguous nature of art-historical information.
FOIS 2026 (16th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Vitória, Brazil), as the context for the field of formal ontology.