RETOLD: One step back, two steps forward

In September, the six RETOLD partners met in Germany. With a little over 12 months to go, we realised there were some issues. Our biggest challenge is to make an app which works for open-air museums. The technique on the one side must fit with the museum reality on the other.

Actually, we have to dive from the museums into the technique, and back again! So, where the museums know what they want out of this product, our struggle to make it fit into bits and bytes is a real one. On the top of that, we want that database to be able to "speak" with other databases out there, so we have to follow some internationally accepted logic and structure. For this, there is CIDOC-CRM, stemming from the museum world itself, but it is not as easy as it sounds. We now must look at all the questions and possible answers the museums expect, and need to map each of these, and find out where they fit in the CIDOC-CRM. This means we constantly have to go back and forth to the museums to ask: "is this what you mean by that". We underestimated this big time :-) and it is a very intense collaboration right now. But if we get out of this arena unharmed, we will have something which works intuitively while actually, every possible step is mapped out.