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CDWA Lite

What is CDWA Lite?

CDWA Lite was an XML schema to describe core records for works of art and material culture based on CDWA and CCO. CDWA Lite records were intended for contribution to union catalogs and other repositories using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) harvesting protocol. CDWA Lite was developed at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) by members of the expert user community, led by Joe Shubitowski and Karim Boughida. In 2010, the CDWA Lite schema was enlarged and integrated into the Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO), available on the CIDOC site.

What is LIDO?

The CDWA Lite schema has been enlarged and integrated into LIDO. LIDO v1.1 was released in December 2021. The LIDO schema is available on the ICOM site. The LIDO schema is intended for delivering metadata about art objects, for use in a variety of online services, from an organization’s online collections database to portals of aggregated resources, as well as exposing, sharing, and connecting data on the Web.

LIDO v1.0 was officially launched to the international community in 2010, during the CIDOC Annual Conference that took place in Shanghai as part of the ICOM General Assembly. This schema was the result of the work of the CIDOC Data Harvesting and Interchange Working Group. Led through the CDWA Lite Advisory Committee and the Documentation Committee of the German Museums Association, it was agreed to create a working group to develop a single schema that meets the requirements articulated by CDWA Lite, museumdat, and feedback received from the greater community of information and technology professionals. As part of this effort, compliance with CIDOC-CRM was a major requirement. Work was also carried out to align the LIDO schema with SPECTRUM.

The legacy CDWA Lite schema

As of 2010, the CDWA Lite schema has not been maintained by the Getty. Available on this page are links to the legacy schema for users who have implemented CDWA Lite and may wish to map to LIDO or another schema.

The CDWA Lite schema was intended to describe a format for core records for works of art and material culture, based on the data elements and guidelines contained in the CDWA and CCO. Like VRA Core, CDWA Lite offered an XML format in which to store metadata about works of visual culture in accordance with CCO. CDWA Lite records were intended for contribution to union catalogs and other repositories using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) harvesting protocol. Elements 1 through 19 in this schema are for descriptive metadata, based on CDWA and CCO. Elements 20 through 22 deal with administrative metadata. All attributes are optional unless otherwise noted.

Revised on 8 August 2024
by Emily Benoff