Technical standards

Identifiers

The object is NP-RMB-001 and its record lives at a stable URL that will not move. Where an external authority has an identifier for something referenced here — Rembrandt in the Getty Union List of Artist Names, a technique in the Art & Architecture Thesaurus — it is recorded and linked, and marked as verified only where the project resolved it at the issuing authority itself.

Interoperability

• IIIF Presentation 3.0 — a manifest for the object and a collection for the census, so the record can be opened in any compatible viewer.
• Schema.org / JSON-LD — VisualArtwork for the object, Dataset for the census.
• Dublin Core terms in the metadata exports.
• A read-only JSON API, versioned and rate-limited, over every public entity.
• CSV and BibTeX exports, because a spreadsheet and a reference manager are what most researchers actually use.

Versioning

The data is held as plain files in version control alongside the code. Every change to the record is a commit; the changelog is generated from the record itself rather than maintained by hand. Dossier versions are snapshots, and a released version is never edited — a correction produces a new version and the old one stays reachable.

Deposit

Version 1.0 will be deposited in a repository that issues DOIs, with version DOIs under a concept DOI so that a citation can point either at a specific version or at the record as a continuing thing. It has not been deposited yet, and it will not be until the evidence gates on the publications page are met. A permanent citation of an unchecked record is worse than no citation.

Accessibility

The target is WCAG 2.2 AA in both light and dark themes. Colour never carries meaning alone: the confidence scale is encoded as hatching density as well as hue, so it survives greyscale and colour-blindness. The deep-zoom viewer has keyboard equivalents for every pointer gesture, and every image has a described alternative.

Where this falls short today

• No IIIF Image API service of our own — there are no images to serve.
• No DOI yet.
• Search is exact and structural rather than semantic.
• The API has no authentication and no usage tiers; it is rate-limited and that is all.
• Several external identifiers could not be resolved at their issuing authority and are marked unverified rather than quietly asserted.