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Towards a conceptual model of the sculpture domain

Posted by: Will Wootton 13 years, 3 months ago

One of the first steps involved in the building of a digital resource (and in particular, a database-backed digital resource) is the construction of a conceptual model that can represent the main types of things being dealt with in a project.

In other words, it is fundamental to identify which are the things our database and web-application should 'talk about'; later on, this model can be refined and extended so to become an abstract template of the data-manipulation tasks the software application must be capable of supporting (e.g. entering data into the system, searching and visualising them).

To this purpose, the other day we had a very productive brainstorming session aimed at fleshing out the main items of interest in the world of sculpture. This is obviously a very first step towards the construction of a formal model for this domain; nonetheless, I think that we have already succeeded in highlighting which are the types of entities we'll have to deal with in the next two years.
Here's a list of the main ones we identified:

    • People, such as craftsman's etc..

 

    • Sculptures (of various kinds)

 

    • Materials

 

    • Tools

 

    • General processes that are part of a sculpting project, such as quarrying and transport.

 

    • More specific methods e.g. the ones employed in the carving process

 

  • Traditions, e.g. historical approaches that can inspire the way methods and processes are carried out

The results of our discussions have also been encoded in a mind map, for better readability and also in order to use a technology that would make it easier to share our findings later on.
p.s. In case the interactive image below doesn't work, please notice that the mind map is also available online.