Portfolio/Showroom – Making Art Research Accessible

The Web applications Portfolio and Showroom constitute the foundation for the development of a Current Research Information System (CRIS). It is based on open source technologies (OSS) with a focus on usability and enables its users to manage, store and publish research data and artistic content in heterogeneous formats.

Portfolio/Showroom employ standards and interfaces of existing long-term archiving systems at the institutions and are designed to be used by other research institutions as well. As an OSS, the system also provides incentives for start-ups to develop complementary apps (open innovation).

Our objective is to use Portfolio/Showroom to implement complementary data management for artists and scientists in an intuitive system that closes the infrastructural gap between daily work processes and long-term archiving: Portfolio enables artists and scientists to already compile their data during the implementation of their projects. Data importing and structuring is based on processes and nomenclatures familiar to users via widespread web applications (for example, video and photography portals). In addition, Portfolio provides users with the ability to manage data (e.g., grant access to other users, specify provenance, manage lending, etc.).

The artistic and scientific content published in Showroom is public and features social media tools that support subscribing, communicating, and hierarchizing information. In addition to the functional scope and the individual usability of Portfolio, Showroom facilitates an exchange within the relevant community and between the community and an interested public (Citizen Science) in accordance with the “Vienna Principles”. Project measures include the establishment of expert peer groups as well as a personnel and technical infrastructure for joint development and programming of the applications.

Project activities include the establishment of expert peer groups, as well as a personnel and technical infrastructure for joint development and programming of the applications.