Dr Athanasios Velios

Biography

Fellow of IIC

I am the Collections Data Manager at English Heritage and a visiting researcher at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon. I completed my PhD in the RCA/V&A Conservation (run in association with Imperial College). My PhD work was on Computer Applications to Conservation and Conservation Documentation.

I work with Linked Data technologies, ontologies and knowledge organisation systems to model records from memory institutions. I was PI of the Linked Conservation Data project. I am a member of the ICOM CIDOC-CRM special interest group contributing as a co-editor of the standard. I am a member of the CEN/TC 346 committee on conservation of cultural property and working with the WG 11 on documentation standards. I contribute to the Icon Documentation Network and the IIC Data community platform.

My research focuses on documenting museum practice and museum collections with particular interest in conservation and archiving. I am looking into different ways of recording and documenting objects. I worked with Professor Nicholas Pickwoad on the documentation of binding structures. We developed a method for recording significant features of bindings to study the provenance of books. I developed an XML schema to formalise and validate these records. We led a consortium which developed the Language of Bindings Thesaurus, a thesaurus of bookbinding terms for which I am an editor and coordinator of the editorial board.

I proposed an archiving methodology called "Creative Archiving". It is a way to interpret artists' ideas through classifying their papers. I have researched the work of the artist John Latham through analysis of his archive.

I led an international consortium on conservation documentation: Linked Conservation Data.

I am interested in the Drupal content management system as a web-application delivery platform.

I am a keen supporter of open source software and open distribution of knowledge.