Overview

Background

In August 2015 Department of Archaeology (DoA), Nepal and UNESCO agreed in principle to cooperate in the establishment of an online database of Nepal?s built cultural heritage and moveable objects of art (e.g. from public museums and private collections) with support from the Earthquake Response Coordination Office (ERCO). It was further decided to use the open source program Arches as the platform for the envisioned online database. In this regard, DoA and UNESCO agreed to enter on the effective date into Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to seek/provide the assistance for building the digital database of Nepal’s Cultural Heritage which is known as CHIMS (Cultural Heritage Information Management System).

What is Arches?

Arches is a web-based, geospatial information system for cultural heritage inventory and management. The platform is purpose-built for the international cultural heritage field, and it is designed to record all types of immovable heritage, including archaeological sites, buildings and other historic structures, landscapes, and heritage ensembles or districts.

Arches allows administrators to create their own database schema, and manage their own thesauri, while end users can search, explore and download the resources directly. In this way Arches is not only a robust and easy to use inventory system, it is also a perfect way to publish and disseminate your organization’s cultural heritage information.

Arches is a web framework built on Dango and is designed to make it easier to build applications that need:

  • Geospatial data management and geoprocessing like a GIS (Geograhic Information System) offers, but with a much more flexible approach for modeling the geometries associated with a resource.
  • the ability to import arbitrary data schema in the form of graphs as a means of defining the set of attributes that describe data resources
  • an Ontology as a means of formally naming and defining data types, properties, and the relationships between the data entities that describe a resource.
  • Thesauri to manage the controlled vocabularies needed to describe and index information in a consistent and uniform way.

Arches manages data “resources”. Resources can represent almost anything you want: physical things (such as a cultural heritage object), temporal things (such as activities or events), actors (such as a person or organization), or conceptual objects (such as an image. document, or other information carrier).

Resources are defined as directed graphs (nodes connected by edges). Nodes in the graph are used to represent the attributes (or collection of attributes) of a resource and edges define the type of relationship between attributes. In practice, a resource graph in Arches functions much like a schema does in a relational database.

Arches provides core services for creating, reading, updating, and deleting resources. Because resources are defined as graphs, Arches provides the services needed to import and parse resource graphs, as well the ability to create and interact with instance graphs (e.g. an instance of a resource graph).