Vom Inventar zum Knowledge Graph

This article examines the historical development of object documentation based on the Berlin Kunstkammer and its successor institutions from the early modern period to the present day. Using selected inventories and documentation media, it shows how practices of cataloguing, organizing, and evaluating collection objects have changed under institutional, scientific, and social influences. The analysis ranges from legally motivated property registers of the 17th century to technically differentiated catalogs of the 18th and 19th centuries to standardized analog and digital inventorying since the 20th century. Particular attention is paid to provenance research and current requirements for transparent, ethically responsible, and interoperable collection documentation. Using the example of digital object biographies and semantic knowledge graphs based on CIDOC CRM, it is shown how heterogeneous collection data can be networked and made usable for research purposes.