Creating Resources in Arches 4

How to Create Resources in Arches 4 Cultural Heritage Management Software

In this post, I’d like to give you a quick step-by-step walkthrough of how to model and create useful data in Arches 4.

Branches, Resource Models and Resources

Before we dive in, let me define a few terms:

Branches are partial data model graphs used for modeling data in Arches; they are not entities which collect data themselves, but rather define groups of modeled data that can be used to compose models that collect data.

Resource Models are those models which actually represent business data collected by Arches which are created by adding one or more “Branches”.

Resource is the name we give to an instance of “Resource Model” in the database (for example, if you had a “Resource Model” called “Actor”, you might add to your database a “Resource” using that model meant to represent a particular historical figure)

My goal is to show the process of designing your Branches and Resource Models all the way through collecting and reporting on Resource data. To do this, I’m going to create a very simple Resource Model that I’ll call “Actor” which will simply collect name and job information.

How to Create Branches in Arches

To start, we’ll need to design some branches, which represent the semantic groups of data we want to collect. I’m going to create two:

Create a simple “Name” branch – this will consist of a branch with two nodes, one for “Name” and one for “Name Type”. We can create this branch by simply cloning the “Node/Node Type” branch and adjusting it a bit.

branch1

Name node

branch2

Name Type node

branch3

Create a simple “Job” branch – we will keep this branch very simple: two nodes (‘Title’ and ‘Organization’), both strings to keep things simple:

branch4

branch5

branch6

How to a Create Resource Model in Arches

Now, we can create the Resource Model, which are the data models for the entities which Arches collects and tracks:

Create  a new Resource Model

resources1

Name it the ‘Actor’ Resource Model

resources2

Add the “Name” and “Job” cards.

resources3

Name card details

resources4

Job card details

resources5

Add a main form, and add cards to it.

resources6

Add a report for the “Actor” Resource Model.

resources7

Activate the Report.

resources8

Add a new “Actor” Resource

Now that we’ve modeled an “Actor” as a Resource Model, we can begin to collect actual “Actor” Resources.

Click the button to add a new “Actor”

report2

Enter data into Actor form and click save.

report3

With the Actor resource now in the Arches database, we can also bring up it’s report.

report4

That’s it! We just modeled our data from scratch in Arches 4, and started collecting and reporting on Resource information.

Note: the screenshots shown in here are early captures and things may change in the final product

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