Silk Now is a research project that improves the understanding, conservation and dissemination of European silk heritage from the 15th to the 19th century. It applies next-generation computing research to the needs of diverse users (museums, education, tourism, creative industries, media…), and preserves the tangible and intangible heritage associated with silk.
The projects’s main goals are
- Semantically relating digitized European silk heritage, enabling data interoperability across different collections, for advanced searching abilities.
- Building a “Virtual Loom” to clone weaving techniques. This will allow users to discover the complexity, artistic and artisanal values of ancient silk textiles, while preserving them for future generations.
- Improve the understanding of the European silk heritage, thanks to visual tools that show the spatio-temporal relationships of data, including an open-access, multilingual thesaurus.