Opening access to our shared past: the Arches open source FAIR data management platform

The Arches open source FAIR data management platform, originally developed to manage cultural heritage information regarding historic resources such as historic buildings, structures, districts, archaeological sites and cultural landscapes, enables governments and organizations worldwide to manage and provide open access to their important data. The enterprise OSS, created and sponsored by the non-profit Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) based in Los Angeles, was developed to be extremely flexible in order to accommodate a diverse set of use cases and methodologies, both within cultural heritage and in other sectors, and includes the following feature set (not an exhaustive list):

• Geospatial visualization and search

• Controlled vocabulary/thesauri management

• Full internationalization

• Semantic, self-describing, & sustainable data structure 

• Accommodation of different ontologies

• Dynamic UI-generation tool

• Granular permissions controls

• Fuzzy date support and visualization

• Integrated data entry workflows

• Data relationships network graph

• Scientific data visualization

• Image annotation

 Learn more about the unique technical details of how the software, now in its Version 7, has been developed to incorporate the above capabilities using the following technologies and standards:

• PostgreSQL

• Django/Python

• IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework)

• FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles

Also, learn about how Arches and its open source community is helping to open access to government historic preservation information in Los Angeles and worldwide. In particular, learn about HistoricPlacesLA (HPLA), the City of LA’s implementation of Arches and how it opens access to the City’s cultural resource data for the general public and enhances internal city planning processes regarding heritage designation and conservation.