Europeana Fashion Thesaurus: capturing imagination

Today's guest blog comes from Nacha Van Steen, Europeana Fashion partner at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, and discusses how and why the project is developing a thesaurus on fashion.

What springs to mind when I say ‘Fashion’? Exactly, an immense variety of images, clothes, shoes, magazines, lifestyle choices, as diverse and complex as your own imagination. Now imagine trying to capture all of that in words, and worse still, structure…

And yet, that is exactly what the Europeana Fashion project has set out to do in creating a thesaurus on fashion, a reference that assembles all things fashion in a controlled, structured hierarchy, including synonyms and antonyms.

The thesaurus will allow for maximum compatibility between the Europeana Fashion project and related fashion content. It will be used within the project for metadata enrichment and for high quality disclosure of fashion-related content within Europeana itself. Moreover, it will be made publicly available on the project’s own website, ready to be used by all interested.

Because it will exist as a digital reference only, it can serve as a starting point for fashion researchers, can be expanded as the need arises and will hopefully encompass the richness and complexity that the fashion industry, from creator to manufacturer to buyer and collector, has to offer.

The benefits are numerous: the vocabulary is controlled, can be translated (the Europeana Fashion Project offers 10 languages!), and the information can be retrieved in a fast, complete and orderly manner. Relationships become clear, data entry is simplified and a vast amount of knowledge is gathered in an logical, structured, organised way.

However, creativity – the base, the building block of fashion - always comes up with new takes on existing concepts. It evades capture, poses new questions and generally does not respond well to structure and organisation.

So what do we do? We go on right ahead anyway, because the benefits far outweigh the obstacles.

Based on existing international standards, first and foremost the Getty Research Institute’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus(AAT), we create a faceted and hierarchical thesaurus on fashion in no less than 10 languages on fashion as a cultural domain. We will innovate and expand existing AAT-concepts and continuously offer high quality disclosure of fashion-related content.

The aim is to provide users with a myriad of search options, to help them find what you need, to keep them informed, interested and curious, and to help the fashion domain to publish its work.

And how? Through creativity, of course.

To find out more about the project, the thesaurus and the developments, please visit our Europeana Fashion Project website.