Design

The components of a digital library to search and discover NFT Art

The architecture of The NFT Art Digital Library

General architecture

The NFT art Digital Library will provide two main services to the user: search and discovery.

In the NFT Art Digital Library the digital object will be hosted by IPFS, that will assign an immutable content identifier (CID). NFT art will be exposed by a IIIF server. Through Mirador the user will be able both to visualize the NFT art and to explore the related metadata.

Since Omeka s will be used as content management system (CMS) the metadata will be stored in MySQL, a relational database, in order to retrieve images through the Metadata Search module. In the relational database will be stored also the features extracted from the images from which it will be possible to suggest images to the user selected by means of a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system.

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Process

From the collection to the Linked Open Data

From the model to the website

The collection

The collection of the NFT art Digital Library will be extracted from the collection of NFT art on KnownOrigin. Privates will have the possibility to load their own NFT art too.

The collection can be explored according to

  • Artists
  • Medium
  • Collections

The metadata

Metadata level Chosen standard
Descriptive metadata Schema.org
CIDOC-CRM
DublinCore
Subject headings Dewey Decimal Classification
Name Authority Getty Union List of Artist Names
Administrative metadata METS
Preservation PREMIS

KnownOrigin provides the NFT art metadata in a json file stored in IPFS exposed by Pinata, a NFT media management service. Once the NFT art from KnownOrigin enters the digital libraries collections, those metadata will be mapped according to the International Standards. NFT art coming from privates will be recorded according to the same metadata.

Information retrieval

An NFT art can be searched through the image meta search, i.e. retrieval based on the research against metadata. The user can search for keywords that will be matched against the tags, title, author and description metadata of the NFT art.

Another way to retrieve information is the content-based image retrieval selection sorted by similarity of the NFT art in the database that shares more features with the selected one.

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Envisioned Outcomes

The NFT Art Digital Libraries: a vision on the implementation

The homepage's wireframe of the digital library

Accessibility

The NFT Art Digital Library will be accessible through a website. Omeka s will be used as content management system (CMS). The homepage will provide access to the content according to its categorization: by artist, by medium and by collection.

Each item will have a link to its visualization and the possibility to access and download the relative metadata.

Advanced Search

The user will be able to search according to keywords that will be matched against metadata. Those keywords can be contained in the title,in the name of the artist, tags and description of the item.

Discovery

The page dedicated to an item will have two additional sections that will provide suggestions to the user:

  • The related artworks of the same artist
  • The most similar artworks contained in the digital library

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