From Inception to Interface: Ontologies, Data Modelling, and Linked Data for Online Exhibition-Making

‘Beyond the Book: A Digital Journey through the Treasures of the Emmerson Collection’ is an online exhibition composed of several, interconnected parts: prose, images, photogrammetry, and data. To create the site, we experimented with a new methodology for online exhibition-making: using the cultural heritage ontology the CIDOC CRM, we modelled, created, and published Linked Data related to the Emmerson Collection at State Library Victoria. As well as communicating context within the exhibition, this data encodes it in a versatile and durable form, in a way that can be repurposed and integrated into collection catalogues and other resources. In this article, we discuss the process of experimenting with this method for online exhibition-making as well as the challenges of drawing on data to create an online exhibition from inception to interface.