Panopticon

panOpticon was founded to meet the needs of artists' estates & foundations, scholars, working artists, and researchers who are looking for tools to manage and publish art provenance research. The design challenge for panOpticon is not simply to control the self-organizing processes, as some tools attempt to do, but to facilitate the emergence of higher-level outcomes e.g, more coherent understanding, accountability, access control, communication, and the exchange and distribution of usable data, metadata, information, and knowledge. Reliable information about artworks and their histories may be published, it can be used to create educational resources and interactive displays, it is indispensable when organizing exhibitions, it is of great help to working artists who are promoting themselves, and it is an essential ingredient in the production of an authoritative catalogue raisonné. Our system follows best practices as recommended by leading members of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association. We use the Getty Categories for the Description of Works of Art as a standard for describing cultural objects and The Chicago Manual of Style as a style guide. We are also indebted to the resources of the Association of Art Editors (AAE) and The Art Institute of Chicago Guide to Museum Publications. And finally, we continue to work with professional catalogers to update and improve our software protocols. Uniform data standards not only promote the recording of information consistently, they are fundamental to retrieving it efficiently. Data standards also improve content management, eliminate redundancy, and make for meaningful information sharing. The design challenge for panOpticon isn't simply to control the self-organizing processes, as some tools attempt to do, but to facilitate the emergence of higher-level outcomes e.g, coherent understanding, accountability, access control, communication, and the exchange and distribution of useful information.