Introducing VISU: Vagueness, Incompleteness, Subjectivity, and Uncertainty in Art Provenance Data

The acronym VISU refers to Vagueness, Incompleteness, Subjectivity, and Uncertainty found in provenance records, which document the history of ownership and socio-economic custody changes of an object. VISU information represents the intellectual effort of researchers and its limits in reconstructing historical events from archival sources. Although provenance has mainly been used in the past to assess an object’s artistic and economic value, it has recently become crucial information from an ethical and legal viewpoint. In light of this, there is a growing interest in structuring provenance information in a machine-readable format and making this data openly accessible to anyone, e.g., by publishing provenance data as linked open data. However, with the impetus to publish provenance linked open data, we risk losing or simplifying VISU information. After describing VISU information and analysing current community standards, this article illustrates how to represent such information in publishing provenance linked open data.