Neo4Art - Traversing Art Through Its Connections

A warm welcome from LARUS Business Automation stuff! We're a software company based in Venice, where we build amazing web applications based on the Spring Framework, following principles behind Agile Manifesto.

ITALY, the cradle of art!

The Arts

THE ARTS are a manifestation of our creative impulse, finally meant to make the observer feels emotions.

Think for example of the emotions you feel when you receive a drawing from your children, when you listen to a song of your favourite artist or when you visit towns such as Venice, Paris, London or Berlin.

That's the reason why we have decided to realise this project: helping you to get in touch with THE ARTS to let you finally experiment new emotions.

A web project for the community

Our enthusiasm for computer science led us to believe that Internet is the perfect place to make THE ARTS accessible to everyone and powerful technologies can help us to discover new facts impossible to be found out before.

That's why, we have dediced to start developing this new crowfounded open-source art project.

Connecting art topics

Our project will be quite different from more traditional existing art portals because we are mainly focused on CONNECTIONS between every kind of topics regarding THE ARTS.

But what do we mean by connected information and why are we so interested in them?

Well, every time you click a link on whatever internet page you are indeed declaring your interest in a connected information.

The same way, what we want to achieve by our project is to discover automatically new topics you're interested in, by traversing art through its connections.

Let us just take an example. Suppose you're planning your holiday in Paris. If you love the famous post-impressionist painter VAN GOGH you probably won't miss his masterpieces from the D'Orsay Museum for no reason at all. Among the others, you can admire his LA SIESTA. Did you know that it's a copy of one of his biggest influencers JUAN-FRANCOIS MILLET, who was indeed a realist? Did you know it's exposed at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts? Once again, did you know that in the same museum you can also see Millet's artwork THE ANGELUS, which became an obsession for the Spanish surrealist painter SALVADOR DALI, who performed various re-interpretations of the same topic and also wrote an essay entitled THE TRAGIC MITH OF MILLET'S ANGELUS? Well, those are basic samples that demonstrate how topics are so strictly connected and how much we can learn from that.

Technology

Luckily, technology can help us to do more complex analysis, such as sentiment analysis or colour analysis through which we can discover amazing stuff hidden behind every artwork.

By connecting our system to the social networks, we could understand what people are discussing on the web. For example, if people that like D'Orsay Museum as you do, also like Marmottan Monet Museum, we could recommend another museum that you may not have ever heard.

These are all examples of what we consider connections: a really powerful tool that can help us to explore art, by traversing it from different perspectives.

The underlying technology we're going to use is Neo4j, the world's leading open-source graph database, which is ideal for managing interconnected data.

And the amazing thing is that Neo4j does that at incredible speed!

You might have already heard about graph databases because social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are built on top of them to manage connections between you and your friends, you and groups that you follow and things that you like.

Neo4j is the solution that best supports our purpose of improving knowledge about art by discovering connected information.

Bold Thanks!

If you like our idea, please consider to become a contributor of this project!

Lorenzo, Olimpia, Enrico, Mattia and all stuff @ LARUS Business Automation

www.neo4art.org / [email protected]