Last year I wrote about DressDiscover, a suite of open source web applications for digital collections of historic clothing.

Recently my collaborator on DressDiscover, Arden Kirkland, has been working on a new version of Costume Core, her ontology for describing artifacts of historic clothing. The new release includes an OWL ontology that formally describes Costume Core and links its properties to other vocabularies such as VRA Core and Dublin Core. Arden was able to use the OWL ontology as a schema for Omeka S, a Content Management System for digital cultural heritage collections.

Costume Core addresses a need for a consistent way of describing garments in collection databases. I plan to incorporate the new ontology into the DressDiscover worksheet and other projects I’ve been working on in this space.