Agent

Info

The agent endpoint provides access to a single agent (person or organisation) related to the collection of Design Museum Gent, enriched with authority links, biographical data, Wikipedia thumbnail, nationality, birth/death information, agent type classification and curated relations to other agents.

endpoint:

GET https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/{PID}

examples:

GET https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00162
GET https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-03731

# check if an agent exists
curl -I 'https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00162'

ARK identifiers

All agent URIs are also resolvable using the ARK identifier format:

GET https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/ark:/29417/agent/{agentPID}

Response codes

Code	Description
200	Successful request
404	Agent not found
500	Server error

Cache validation headers are included on every 200 response:

Header	Description
`ETag`	Cache validation token based on PID and last harvest timestamp
`Last-Modified`	Timestamp of last harvest in HTTP date format
`Cache-Control`	`public, max-age=3600`

Response format

Data is returned as CIDOC-CRM compliant JSON-LD using the following vocabularies:

Prefix	Namespace
`crm`	http://www.cidoc-crm.org/cidoc-crm/
`owl`	https://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#
`rdfs`	http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#
`xsd`	http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#
`prov`	http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#
`person`	http://www.w3.org/ns/person#

Fields

Basic identification

Field	Type	Description	Example
`@id`	URI	Internal DMG URI for the agent	`https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00162`
`@type`	string	CIDOC-CRM class — reflects agent type classification	`crm:E21_Person`, `crm:E74_Group` or `crm:E39_Actor`
`rdfs:label`	string	Default label (full name)	`"Memphis"`
`prov:generatedAtTime`	xsd:dateTime	Timestamp of last harvest	`"2026-04-24T01:45:12"`

Agent type — `@type`

The @type field reflects the classification of the agent:

`@type`	Description
`crm:E21_Person`	Individual person
`crm:E74_Group`	Organisation, studio, collective or company
`crm:E39_Actor`	Unknown — not yet classified or classification inconclusive

Classification methodology

Agent types are determined from two sources, applied in order of availability:

1. Registrar system export — the primary source. The museum's collection management system records each agent as either persoon (person) or instelling (institution) in the naam.soort field. This covers the majority of agents in the collection.

2. Wikidata — used as a fallback for agents with a Wikidata owl:sameAs link. The instance of (P31) property is used to distinguish humans (Q5) from organisations (Q43229 and related types).

Agents that could not be classified by either method are stored as unknown and returned as crm:E39_Actor. Use ?type=unknown on the agents collection to find unclassified agents.

Filtering by type

Use the ?type= parameter on the agents collection to filter by classification:

GET https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agents?type=individual
GET https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agents?type=organisation

Authority links

owl:sameAs links the agent to external authority records. May include Wikidata, RKD, Getty ULAN and the Stad Gent datahub. Stad Gent URIs (stad.gent/id/...) are persistent identifiers but do not currently resolve. Getty, Wikidata and EU Publications Office URIs do resolve and return linked data.

Provenance — `prov:generatedAtTime`

Each record includes a prov:generatedAtTime timestamp indicating when the record was last harvested from the source system.

Incremental harvesting

Use prov:generatedAtTime together with ?modifiedSince= to build efficient incremental sync pipelines:

GET https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agents?modifiedSince=2026-05-01&fullRecord=true

Identifiers and appellations — `crm:P1_is_identified_by`

An array of crm:E42_Identifier (internal DMG reference number) and crm:E41_Appellation nodes. Includes the preferred name, any alternative names, the internal reference number, and — when a Wikipedia page exists — multilingual Wikipedia titles as additional appellations.

Gender — `crm:P2_has_type`

For individual persons, gender is expressed using the EU Publications Office human sex authority. Organisations do not include this field.

Nationality — `person:citizenship`

Nationality is expressed using person:citizenship from the W3C Basic Person vocabulary. The value is a crm:E53_Place node using the EU Publications Office country authority, with multilingual rdfs:label in Dutch, English and French.

"person:citizenship": {
    "@id": "http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/country/BEL",
    "@type": "crm:E53_Place",
    "rdfs:label": [
        { "@value": "België",   "@language": "nl" },
        { "@value": "Belgium",  "@language": "en" },
        { "@value": "Belgique", "@language": "fr" }
    ]
}

Why person:citizenship instead of crm:P107i?

crm:P107i_is_current_or_former_member_of is reserved exclusively for curated group membership relations entered via the admin (member_of, employee_of, collaborator, etc.). Using a separate property for nationality avoids ambiguity and makes consumer-side processing straightforward — no type inspection needed.

Birth and death

crm:P98i_was_born — birth event as crm:E67_Birth with date (crm:P4_has_time-span) and place (crm:E53_Place, Getty TGN URI where available).

crm:P100i_died_in — death event as crm:E69_Death with date and place.

For organisations, crm:P98i_was_born represents the founding date and place where available.

Biographies — `crm:P67i_is_referred_to_by`

Array of crm:E33_Linguistic_Object nodes containing Wikipedia biography snippets, one per available language (NLD, ENG, FRA), typed as description (Getty AAT 300080091). Each node includes a crm:P129i_is_subject_of link to the Wikipedia source page.

Attribution

All biography texts are sourced from Wikipedia and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Attribution to Wikipedia and the license must be included when displaying this content.

Wikipedia image — `thumbnail`

When a Wikipedia thumbnail is available, a thumbnail convenience key is included on the root object containing the image URL as a plain string. The first available thumbnail across Dutch, English and French Wikipedia is used.

"thumbnail": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Portrait_de_L.H._De_Koninck.JPG"

Info

thumbnail is a non-CIDOC convenience key — analogous to Linked Art's _label. It is not a formal property declaration but a developer shortcut for quickly accessing the Wikipedia image without traversing the full CIDOC structure.

Attribution

Wikipedia images are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 or compatible licenses. Always check and display the license when using these images.

Agent relations

Curated relationships between agents are expressed using standard CIDOC-CRM properties. Relations are entered via the admin interface and stored bidirectionally — both directions are always present in the database.

The CIDOC-CRM property used depends on the relation type. Where multiple relation types share a property, a crm:P2_has_type qualifier is added to disambiguate.

Property mapping

Relation	CIDOC-CRM property	Qualifier
`parent_of`	`crm:P152i_is_parent_of`	—
`child_of`	`crm:P152_has_parent`	—
`spouse_of`	`crm:P107i_is_current_or_former_member_of`	`crm:P2_has_type` → `spouse`
`sibling_of`	`crm:P107i_is_current_or_former_member_of`	`crm:P2_has_type` → `sibling`
`employer_of`	`crm:P107_has_current_or_former_member`	`crm:P2_has_type` → `employee`
`employee_of`	`crm:P107i_is_current_or_former_member_of`	`crm:P2_has_type` → `employee`
`mentor_of`	`crm:P107_has_current_or_former_member`	`crm:P2_has_type` → `student`
`student_of`	`crm:P107i_is_current_or_former_member_of`	`crm:P2_has_type` → `mentor`
`collaborator`	`crm:P107i_is_current_or_former_member_of`	`crm:P2_has_type` → `collaborator`
`member_of`	`crm:P107i_is_current_or_former_member_of`	`crm:P2_has_type` → `member`
`has_member`	`crm:P107_has_current_or_former_member`	`crm:P2_has_type` → `member`
`founded`	`crm:P107_has_current_or_former_member`	`crm:P2_has_type` → `founded`
`founded_by`	`crm:P107i_is_current_or_former_member_of`	`crm:P2_has_type` → `founder`

Relations that share a CRM property are grouped into a single array on that property. Each related agent node is a resolvable DMG agent URI.

"crm:P152i_is_parent_of": {
    "@id": "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00021",
    "@type": "crm:E21_Person"
},
"crm:P107i_is_current_or_former_member_of": [
    {
        "@id": "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00162",
        "@type": "crm:E74_Group",
        "crm:P2_has_type": {
            "@id": "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/type/relation/member",
            "@type": "crm:E55_Type",
            "rdfs:label": "member"
        }
    },
    {
        "@id": "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00005",
        "@type": "crm:E39_Actor",
        "crm:P2_has_type": {
            "@id": "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/type/relation/collaborator",
            "@type": "crm:E55_Type",
            "rdfs:label": "collaborator"
        }
    }
]

Info

crm:P107i_is_current_or_former_member_of is used exclusively for curated group membership relations. Nationality is expressed separately via person:citizenship — the two will never appear on the same property.

Example response — organisation

{
    "@context": {
        "crm":    "http://www.cidoc-crm.org/cidoc-crm/",
        "owl":    "https://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#",
        "xsd":    "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#",
        "prov":   "http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#",
        "rdfs":   "http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#",
        "person": "http://www.w3.org/ns/person#"
    },
    "@id":    "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00162",
    "@type":  "crm:E74_Group",
    "owl:sameAs": [
        "https://stad.gent/id/agent/530000534",
        "http://vocab.getty.edu/ulan/500125093",
        "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1273221"
    ],
    "rdfs:label": "Memphis",
    "prov:generatedAtTime": {
        "@type":  "xsd:dateTime",
        "@value": "2026-04-24T01:45:12.5701818"
    },
    "crm:P98i_was_born": {
        "@id":   "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00162/birth",
        "@type": "crm:E67_Birth",
        "crm:P4_has_time-span": {
            "@type":      "crm:E52_Time-Span",
            "rdfs:label": "1981"
        },
        "crm:P7_took_place_at": {
            "@id":        "http://vocab.getty.edu/tgn/7005903",
            "@type":      "crm:E53_Place",
            "rdfs:label": "Milaan"
        }
    },
    "crm:P1_is_identified_by": [
        {
            "@id":        "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00162/appellation/preferred",
            "@type":      "crm:E41_Appellation",
            "rdfs:label": "Memphis"
        },
        {
            "@id":        "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00162/identifier/intern",
            "@type":      "crm:E42_Identifier",
            "rdfs:label": "DMG-A-00162",
            "crm:P2_has_type": {
                "@id":        "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/type/intern-referentienummer",
                "@type":      "crm:E55_Type",
                "rdfs:label": "Intern referentienummer"
            }
        },
        {
            "@type":      "crm:E41_Appellation",
            "rdfs:label": "Memphis Group",
            "crm:P72_has_language": {
                "@id": "http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/language/ENG"
            },
            "crm:P129i_is_subject_of": {
                "@id":        "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Group",
                "@type":      "crm:E73_Information_Object",
                "rdfs:label": "Wikipedia (en)"
            }
        }
    ],
    "crm:P67i_is_referred_to_by": [
        {
            "@type":      "crm:E33_Linguistic_Object",
            "rdfs:label": "The Memphis Group was an Italian design and architecture group founded by Ettore Sottsass in Milan in 1981.",
            "crm:P2_has_type": {
                "@id":        "http://vocab.getty.edu/aat/300080091",
                "@type":      "crm:E55_Type",
                "rdfs:label": "description"
            },
            "crm:P72_has_language": {
                "@id": "http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/language/ENG"
            },
            "crm:P129i_is_subject_of": {
                "@id":        "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Group",
                "@type":      "crm:E73_Information_Object",
                "rdfs:label": "Wikipedia (en)"
            }
        }
    ],
    "thumbnail": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Memphis-Milano_Movement.jpg",
    "crm:P107_has_current_or_former_member": [
        {
            "@id":   "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00021",
            "@type": "crm:E21_Person",
            "crm:P2_has_type": {
                "@id":        "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/type/relation/member",
                "@type":      "crm:E55_Type",
                "rdfs:label": "member"
            }
        },
        {
            "@id":   "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00022",
            "@type": "crm:E21_Person",
            "crm:P2_has_type": {
                "@id":        "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/type/relation/founded",
                "@type":      "crm:E55_Type",
                "rdfs:label": "founded"
            }
        }
    ]
}

Example response — individual with nationality and relations

{
    "@context": {
        "crm":    "http://www.cidoc-crm.org/cidoc-crm/",
        "owl":    "https://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#",
        "xsd":    "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#",
        "prov":   "http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#",
        "rdfs":   "http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#",
        "person": "http://www.w3.org/ns/person#"
    },
    "@id":    "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-03731",
    "@type":  "crm:E21_Person",
    "owl:sameAs": [
        "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q43136175"
    ],
    "rdfs:label": "Sabino, Marius-Ernest",
    "prov:generatedAtTime": {
        "@type":  "xsd:dateTime",
        "@value": "2026-05-01T01:40:29.7020697"
    },
    "crm:P98i_was_born": {
        "@id":   "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-03731/birth",
        "@type": "crm:E67_Birth",
        "crm:P4_has_time-span": {
            "@type":      "crm:E52_Time-Span",
            "rdfs:label": "1878"
        },
        "crm:P7_took_place_at": {
            "@id":        "http://vocab.getty.edu/tgn/7005903",
            "@type":      "crm:E53_Place",
            "rdfs:label": "Milaan"
        }
    },
    "crm:P100i_died_in": {
        "@id":   "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-03731/death",
        "@type": "crm:E69_Death",
        "crm:P4_has_time-span": {
            "@type":      "crm:E52_Time-Span",
            "rdfs:label": "1961"
        }
    },
    "person:citizenship": {
        "@id":   "http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/country/ITA",
        "@type": "crm:E53_Place",
        "rdfs:label": [
            { "@value": "Italië", "@language": "nl" },
            { "@value": "Italy",  "@language": "en" },
            { "@value": "Italie", "@language": "fr" }
        ]
    },
    "crm:P107i_is_current_or_former_member_of": {
        "@id":   "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-00162",
        "@type": "crm:E74_Group",
        "crm:P2_has_type": {
            "@id":        "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/type/relation/member",
            "@type":      "crm:E55_Type",
            "rdfs:label": "member"
        }
    },
    "crm:P152i_is_parent_of": {
        "@id":   "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-04500",
        "@type": "crm:E21_Person"
    },
    "crm:P1_is_identified_by": [
        {
            "@id":        "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-03731/appellation/preferred",
            "@type":      "crm:E41_Appellation",
            "rdfs:label": "Sabino, Marius-Ernest"
        },
        {
            "@id":        "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/agent/DMG-A-03731/identifier/intern",
            "@type":      "crm:E42_Identifier",
            "rdfs:label": "DMG-A-03731",
            "crm:P2_has_type": {
                "@id":        "https://data.designmuseumgent.be/v2/id/type/intern-referentienummer",
                "@type":      "crm:E55_Type",
                "rdfs:label": "Intern referentienummer"
            }
        }
    ],
    "crm:P67i_is_referred_to_by": [
        {
            "@type":      "crm:E33_Linguistic_Object",
            "rdfs:label": "Marius-Ernest Sabino was an Italian-born French glassmaker known for his Art Deco opalescent glass.",
            "crm:P2_has_type": {
                "@id":        "http://vocab.getty.edu/aat/300080091",
                "@type":      "crm:E55_Type",
                "rdfs:label": "description"
            },
            "crm:P72_has_language": {
                "@id": "http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/language/ENG"
            },
            "crm:P129i_is_subject_of": {
                "@id":        "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius-Ernest_Sabino",
                "@type":      "crm:E73_Information_Object",
                "rdfs:label": "Wikipedia (en)"
            }
        }
    ],
    "thumbnail": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/example.jpg"
}

Examples

Organisation with members: DMG-A-00162
Individual with biography: DMG-A-03731