DESIGN MUSEUM GENT — REST API

This REST API exposes linked data related to Design Museum Gent. It provides access to collection objects, agents, exhibitions and thesaurus concepts as CIDOC-CRM compliant JSON-LD. The data is harvested from the Linked Data Event Streams and all URIs are compliant with the Flemish URI standard.

📖 Full documentation: api.designmuseumgent.be 🔧 Swagger UI: data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/api-docs 📋 Changelog: CHANGELOG.md

Note

Scope. The API serves the objects that have been published through it — around ten thousand of the twenty-four thousand the museum holds. Which objects have been published, and in what order, is a decision made by people, and it shapes every count and statistic these endpoints return. This matters most for the index endpoints: a figure such as "grey accounts for half the collection palette" describes the published catalogue, not the collection.

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Collections

Endpoint	URI	Description
Objects	GET /v2/id/objects	Paginated collection of all objects
Agents	GET /v2/id/agents	Paginated collection of all agents
Exhibitions	GET /v2/id/exhibitions	Paginated collection of all exhibitions
Concepts	GET /v2/id/concepts	Paginated collection of the thesaurus
Private objects	GET /v2/id/private/objects	Authenticated private stream

All collection endpoints support ?fullRecord=true for bulk harvesting, ?modifiedSince=YYYY-MM-DD for incremental updates, ?q= for full text search, and use Hydra Core Vocabulary for pagination with Link headers.

Important

Records whose persistent URI redirects elsewhere — merged, renumbered or withdrawn — are excluded from the collection listings. They remain individually resolvable at /v2/id/object/{PID}, returning 301 or 410. If you maintain a mirror, reconcile against a full pass periodically: ?modifiedSince= cannot tell you that a record has left the collection.

Single entities

Endpoint	URI	Description
Object	GET /v2/id/object/{PID}	Single collection object
Object — similar	GET /v2/id/object/{PID}/similar	Objects whose photographs resemble this one
Agent	GET /v2/id/agent/{PID}	Single agent record
Exhibition	GET /v2/id/exhibition/{PID}	Single exhibition record
Concept	GET /v2/id/concept/{PID}	Single thesaurus concept

All single entity endpoints support HEAD requests for lightweight existence checks and cache validation.

Index endpoints

These describe the collection rather than return records from it — what values exist, and in what proportion.

Endpoint	URI	Description
Colours	GET /v2/id/colors	Colour index with weighted statistics and hex values
Colours — dominant	GET /v2/id/colors/dominant	Objects sorted by colour dominance
Production	GET /v2/id/production	When the collection's objects were made, and when it acquired them
Types	GET /v2/id/types	Object type index with counts
Materials	GET /v2/id/materials	Material index with counts
Nationalities	GET /v2/id/nationalities	Nationality index with counts
Roles	GET /v2/id/roles	Agent role index with counts
DCAT	GET /v2/	Machine-readable data catalog

Note

Index endpoints are rate limited to 20 requests per minute — far tighter than the collections, because each call aggregates across the whole collection. Cache their responses: the underlying figures change only when the collection is re-harvested.

Resemblance — an index nobody wrote

curl 'https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/object/1975-0061/similar'

Every photograph is encoded as a 768-dimension vector by CLIP (ViT-L-14-openai), a model trained on images paired with the text found near them online. /similar returns the objects whose photographs sit nearest.

The model has never seen this collection. It was never told what a decorative tile is and has no access to any record. It compares pictures. 1975-0061 is a tile painted with a sea creature; its nearest neighbours are all decorative tiles and almost all depict sea creatures, across different designs and centuries, at similarities of 0.92–0.95. No cataloguer ever recorded "sea creature" as a category.

Warning

CLIP carries the associations of the corpus it was trained on, including its blind spots and its clichés. It will group objects for reasons that have nothing to do with design history — a shared backdrop, a similar crop, a photographic convention. similarity measures two photographs, not two objects.

Coverage is 7,307 of 10,238 published objects. For the rest the endpoint returns an empty collection with 200 — the object exists, the question is simply unanswerable for it.

Query parameters

Objects

Parameter	Description
?fullRecord=true	Return full CIDOC-CRM records
?modifiedSince=YYYY-MM-DD	Incremental harvest
?q=	Full text search on titles, descriptions and object number
?concept=	Filter by thesaurus concept PID or URI, expanded to narrower concepts
?conceptSearch=	Search the thesaurus by label (NL/EN/FR) and filter by matching concepts
?agent=	Filter by agent PID or URI — designer or producer
?date=YYYY/YYYY	Filter by production span, overlap logic
?dateFrom=, ?dateTo=	Same, as open-ended bounds
?type=, ?material=	Filter by type or material label. Comma-separated for AND
?color=, ?cssColor=	Filter by base colour or named tone
?colors=true	Include colour data (requires fullRecord=true)
?hasImages=true	Only objects with a IIIF manifest
?hasColors=true	Only objects processed by the colour tagger
?hasParts=true	Only koepelrecords
?isPartOf=true	Only set members
?koepels=exclude	Hide koepelrecords
?language=NLD|FRA|ENG	Only objects with a title in that language
?onDisplay=	Tri-state. Omit for all objects, true for on display, false for not on display
?sortBy=, ?sortOrder=	objectNumber, modified, titleNL/FR/EN, dateBegin, dateEnd

Agents

Parameter	Description
?q=	Full text search on name and agent ID
?nationality=	Filter by nationality
?role=	Filter by role (designer, producer)
?type=	individual, organisation or unknown

Index endpoints

Parameter	Applies to	Description
?onDisplay=true	colors, production, types, materials	Restrict to objects in the collection presentation
?minCount=	colors	Minimum objects a colour must appear on to be listed
?swatchesPerBase=	colors	How many constituent tones each base colour returns
?bucket=	production	Bucket size in years (5–100, default 10)
?yearFrom=, ?yearTo=	production	Axis range
?q=	production	Narrow both measures to a search
?limit=	similar	Objects to return (1–50, default 12)
?minSimilarity=	similar	Only return objects at or above this similarity (0–1)

Quick start

# fetch a single object
curl https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/object/1987-1105

# fetch a single agent
curl https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00162

# paginate through all objects
curl "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/objects?page=1&itemsPerPage=50&fullRecord=true"

# full text search
curl "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/objects?q=roze+glas&hasImages=true"

# search the thesaurus in any of three languages
curl "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/objects?conceptSearch=chaise"

# filter by colour and type
curl "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/objects?color=pink&type=vaas&hasImages=true"

# filter by production period
curl "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/objects?date=1950/1969&hasImages=true"

# objects currently on display
curl "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/objects?onDisplay=true&fullRecord=true"

# the collection's palette, with renderable hex values
curl "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/colors"

# when the collection was made, and when it was collected
curl "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/production?bucket=10&yearFrom=1600"

# objects that resemble this one, from the photographs alone
curl "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/object/1975-0061/similar"

// harvest the full collection
async function harvest(url) {
    const res = await fetch(url)
    const data = await res.json()

    // process data["hydra:member"]
    console.log(`fetched ${data["hydra:member"].length} objects`)

    if (data["hydra:view"]["hydra:next"]) {
        await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, 250)) // polite delay
        await harvest(data["hydra:view"]["hydra:next"])
    } else {
        console.log('harvest complete')
    }
}

harvest('https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/objects?fullRecord=true&itemsPerPage=50')

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v1 has been retired

v1 no longer serves requests. Its URIs return HTTP 410 Gone rather than 404, with headers pointing at the successor:

HTTP/1.1 410 Gone
Deprecation: true
Sunset: Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT
Link: <https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/>; rel="successor-version"

410 rather than 404 is deliberate: these URIs existed and were published, so the honest answer is that the resource is deliberately gone, not that it never existed.

What changed in v2

	v1	v2
Data model	Linked Art / OSLO	Pure CIDOC-CRM
Serialization	JSON-LD (mixed vocabularies)	JSON-LD (strict CIDOC-CRM)
Multilingual	single language fields	crm:E41_Appellation per language
Nationality	plain string	EU Publications Office URI
Biographies	crm:P3_has_note	crm:E33_Linguistic_Object + CC BY-SA
Colour data	separate endpoints	crm:E36_Visual_Item inline
Colour API	/v1/color-api/{color}	?color= / ?cssColor= filters, plus /v2/id/colors
Full text search	—	?q= on objects, agents, concepts
Concept search	—	?concept=, ?conceptSearch= with hierarchy expansion
Date filters	—	?date=, ?dateFrom=, ?dateTo=
Index endpoints	—	colours, production, types, materials, nationalities, roles
Visual similarity	—	/similar on any object, from CLIP image embeddings
Incremental harvest	—	?modifiedSince=
Pagination headers	—	RFC 8288 Link header
HEAD requests	—	Lightweight existence checks
ARK routes	/v1/id/ark:/29417/…	Not carried over
Base URI	/v1/	/v2/

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Standards

• CIDOC-CRM — core data model
• Flemish URI standard — persistent identifiers
• Hydra Core Vocabulary — pagination
• PROV-O — provenance
• SKOS — thesaurus labels and hierarchy
• Getty vocabularies — AAT, ULAN, TGN
• EU Publications Office — language, country, gender authorities
• RFC 8288 — Link header pagination
• IIIF — image delivery
• CLIP (ViT-L-14-openai) — image embeddings behind /similar

Support

• 📖 Documentation
• 🔧 Swagger UI
• 🐛 GitHub Issues
• 📧 olivier.vandhuynslager@stad.gent

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Development and coordination by Olivier Van D'huynslager — Studio Digitaal, Design Museum Gent