Themes, people and events
On May 13 we launched a brand new Flanders Heritage Inventory, with five datasets: heritage objects, designation objects, people, themes and events. Heritage objects and designation objects already covered the core of the inventory; this time we look at the three supporting datasets.
The people and collectives dataset has existed since the very first inventory launched in May 2009. It holds people and organisations who played a role in creating the heritage we describe: architects, contractors, master builders, clients, artists, sculptors, and so on. The dataset emerged in 2007–2009 while assigning thesaurus terms to heritage objects. Until then, heritage objects were mostly documents, which made searching harder — especially with common surnames, finding "all buildings by a particular architect" was difficult. (Did you know there was once an architect named Baksteen, literally "Brick"?) So alongside the thesauri, we also built an authority file holding canonical versions of the designers and other people involved. For the agency, this dataset — like our thesauri — isn't a core dataset in its own right: without the inventory, we wouldn't need it at all.
Over the years the dataset has grown into a fine cross-section of designers, artists and architects who shaped Flanders' heritage. Where possible we enrich each entry with other known names, birth and death dates (or founding dates for organisations), places lived or worked, professions, education, and a short biography, and we link every person or collective to the heritage objects they're connected to as designer, builder, or client. Our people dataset is, in effect, a quick who's who of Flemish immovable heritage.
The events dataset has also existed since May 2009, though for a long time it was only accessible internally. An event is an action performed at a given moment by one or more people or organisations — in practice, limited to actions on or about immovable heritage. That can be something as small as measuring a tree, an excavation or a site inspection, up to a large project like an inventory campaign. It always comes down to: X and Y performed work of type A at location L, from date I to date J. We sometimes add an extended text description with links to further sources, aiming to explain how a piece of information came about. So for a given heritage object you can see which inventory campaign first recorded it, when it was re-surveyed, and when its address was last checked.
The third dataset, themes, has two subtypes: one that already existed in the 2009 inventory, and one added fairly recently. A theme provides context around heritage objects, so certain information doesn't need to be repeated on every individual object. The first themes, added in 2014, fall under content themes — usually a combination of typology, style or period, and location, such as First World War military defences in the front zone, Welcome trees, or Prehistoric barrow complexes and urnfields. With the launch of the new inventory, older descriptions of geographic areas were converted into geographic themes — the old municipality and street introductions from the Bouwen door de Eeuwen Heen series, which, like the content themes, provide context, but purely based on location. That's where you can read more about the historic core of Ghent, Lippenslaan in Knokke, or the port of Antwerp. Some of these theme pages are among our most-visited, and are often used by outside parties as historical context.
None of these three datasets forms the essence of the immovable heritage inventory, but together they make it more interesting and more useful. Want to know more about the new inventory? Read Ten years of the inventory. Questions or suggestions are welcome at ict@onroerenderfgoed.be.