Display : une infrastructure sémantique pour la documentation structurée des accrochages d’exposition

Historical research on exhibitions faces the challenge of mobilizing and exploiting heterogeneous archival documentation to reconstruct collection hangings in art museums. This paper presents Display, a free and open-source web application that provides a semantic infrastructure for documenting the spatial configurations of exhibitions in a structured manner. We posit that a web interface adapted to researchers’ workflows enables non-experts to produce data structured according to a formal ontological model, with quality and completeness comparable to those achieved by expert methods. This paper presents the technical architecture of Display, its user-centered design methodology, and the results of an empirical evaluation conducted on the Feux pâles exhibition corpus. Our contribution is twofold: methodological, in documenting a design process that makes the semantic web accessible, and empirical, in demonstrating that such accessibility is effectively achievable.