The Museo del Prado Online

The project was designed to expand the Museo del Prado’s web presence in order to ensure more user-friendly, straightforward, practical, intuitive and interesting public access to the rich body of resources and contents that make up its heritage. To do so, this heritage was represented via a queriable Knowledge Graph that interlinks the museum’s artworks and authors and enriches them with other knowledge assets pertaining to the museum, such as its encyclopedia and archives. We should add that all of this has been done in order to allow all users to retrieve information according to their interests and intentions, thus encouraging them to enjoy their visit for a longer period of time.

From an internal perspective, this project has sought to develop a rapid, finely tuned system for publishing and creating contents that close the gap between the museum and the varied cross-section of audiences that a public institution must address and for which it must speak, as well as finally permitting the generation of specific websites dedicated to temporary exhibitions or other current events.

In the museum’s opinion, the use of a graph with these characteristics will make it possible to develop advanced services for different groups of users, which will in turn allow the institution to increase the number of registered users and eventual subscribers. This new web presence thus seeks to use the knowledge base of the institution’s rich heritage in a more intensive and efficient manner. And this step reflects efforts not just to make a new museum website, but instead to construct a more open and accessible museum in a larger sense.

As such, we should point out that, from the very start, the construction of this new web presence has employed museum data to improve its own processes of documentation, publishing, editing, communication and publication, rather than merely representing those data for reuse by third parties. This approach has notably influenced how the museum functions by connecting the creation and generation of data with the discovery and publication of knowledge. The project shows that when a unified knowledge graph is used to develop utilities for different audiences, including some of the institution’s own interest groups, the results can significantly transform how the materials that represent the institution’s heritage and knowledge are produced and consumed.