Wunderkammer in English

Project Wunderkammer aims to develop an open source toolbox to build systems to store, manage and publish museum and archives collections. On this blog we´ll present the project: our motivations, progress and setbacks. Expect some tech talk and Web 2.0 and 3.0 sales pitches, but also general thoughts and ideas on how museums and archives can make their collections more accessible on the web.

A Wunderkammer, or Chamber of Curiosities, was a precursor to the modern museum. During the Rennaissance kings, noblemen and rich burghers with an interest in the arts and sciences collected objects of varying kinds: stones precious and semi-precious, fossils, pieces of art and exotic artifacts. They stored and displayed them in purpose-designed rooms, Wunderkammers, or pieces of furniture, Cabinets of Curiosities. These chambers and cabinets of old are what we want to recreate in digital form. Or rather, we wish to give museums and archives the appropriate tools to develop their own Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosity.

The Wunderkammer toolbox is based on a solution we developed for the Swedish National Heritage Board, but updated to support user-generated content (Web 2.0) and the semantic web (Web 3.0). With Wunderkammer the tools for searching in or providing data to the national heritage information web service K-samsök are provided ”out of the box”.

Some brief points on the system architecture, RDF-schemas and dynamic GUI-rendering

  • Wunderkammer uses PostgreSQL as DBMS and Fedora 3 as repository. The web application is developed in Apache Wicket and deployed in Tomcat on an Apache Web Server. IIPImageserver is used to create pyramidised TIFFs and JAI to reisize and reformat images to JPGs.
  • Authentication and authorisation are based on Open SSO and Spring Security.
  • At the core of a Wunderkammer installation are the schemas used to model a particular museums´s data and concepts. The schemas define which type of objects can be created, which attributes they have, if and how many relationships to other objects or media they can have, the concepts and definition of concepts they use to classify their objects, etc.
  • Data structure is defined in a RDF-schema and concepts in a SKOS-document. Combined with a presentation schema (also a RDF-schema, it defines the order of display of  object attributes) the GUI of Wunderkammer is dynamically rendered based on the schemas and the SKOS-document.
  • If/when a process engine (jBPM) is added to Wunderkammer the plan is that museum specific processes (e.g. Accession, Loans in, Loans out, Conservation) will be modelled in an XML-schema or RDF-schema as well and that wizards for the processes will dynamically change based on such a process model.
  • The idea with the model-based GUI is to balance the generic with the specific. Different Wunderkammer deployments will differ mainly in the data-, concepts- and processes modelled rather than in code. The graphical design is CSS-based and will of course also vary with different museums to fit with their particular style.
  • When the application works on object data the objects are Javaobjects, but when they´re saved in Wunderkammer´s Fedora repository they´re serialised as FOXML.

If you´re intrerested in a more detailed description of Wunderkammer please contact david.haskiya at curalia.se