Inscripio

Inscripio is a software platform designed to record, encode, and preserve inscriptions attached to artifacts, documents, and digital objects. It provides a common data model, tools for data entry, and features to verify authenticity and track provenance across the inscription’s lifecycle. The project aims to facilitate interoperability among museums, libraries, and research institutions by standardizing how inscriptions are described and exchanged.

Inscripio originated from a collaboration among archaeologists, conservators, and software developers in the late 2010s. The first public release appeared in 2020, with subsequent major updates introducing cryptographic signing, time-stamping, and an open governance model. The codebase is open source, distributed under the MIT license, with community contributions and formal guidelines for interoperability testing.

Its architecture consists of a core inscription schema, a repository backend, and client libraries. The core schema includes fields such as inscriptionId, artifactId, textContent, language, writingDate, method, and provenance. The platform supports cryptographic signatures to verify authorship and time-stamping to record when inscriptions were created or modified. Data can be exported in JSON-LD and IIIF-compatible manifests, and APIs enable integration with existing museum information systems and digitization workflows. Localization and multilingual support are provided to accommodate diverse collections.

Applications include digitization projects in museums, field archaeology, and archival research. Inscripio supports offline data collection, then synchronization to central servers when online. It is designed to interoperate with established metadata standards and provenance models, promoting consistent recording of scholarly and curatorial information.

Scholarly and curatorial communities have praised Inscripio for its extensibility and support for provenance, while some critique concerns the learning curve and the need for broader adoption to achieve widespread interoperability. See also: Inscription, Digital provenance, Metadata standards, IIIF.