Linking Garments to Knowledge: TextileBase as an Interdisciplinary Graph for Dress and Textile Research

The article demonstrates how dress history and textile-related research can be enhanced through the interoperability of knowledge provided by a knowledge graph. The growing availability of digital cultural and historical data is not matched by a similar increase in their usability. Therefore, expanding the search radius to collections across disciplines and countries requires harmonisation and interoperability of knowledge. Reprex has created TextileBase – a knowledge base fully interoperable with libraries, archives, museums, the open knowledge system Wikidata, and open science repository systems. The article highlights key considerations when formulating searches and addressing terminology dissimilarities to ensure that data providers working across country, language, or disciplinary boundaries understand the intended meaning. To improve and streamline searchability in libraries for textual sources mentioning relevant historical garments, archives for their contemporary depictions, and museum collections for new artefacts, TextileBase transforms data and metadata into knowledge statements, links terms to an international controlled vocabulary, and carefully compares the works of various research and collection institutions.

TextileBase was developed with the tooling of the Open Music Observatory, showing a different exploitation pathway from music right management and policy data management.