Artprice Accelerates its Art Market Standardisation

PARIS, June 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

As already announced in our press release on 14 May 2012, Artprice has now started the progressive transfer to internet freeware of a large part of its database structure and of its Art market standardisation (owner licenses distributed freely with certain usage restrictions). All of the industrial processes forming Artprice's databases are patent protected, notably by the A.P.P. (Agence de Protection des Programmes - French Software Protection Agency).

Since 1 June 2012, the Art world, particularly Institutions, Universities, Museums, Foundations, Libraries, Legal & Customs Services, Copywriters (like ADAGP), Insurers, Encyclopaedic databases (like Wikipedia), Internet Directories and, of course, Auction Houses, Galleries, and Associations of Valuers and Appraisers, now have free access to Artprice's Artist-index.com. This standardised database, Artist-id.com, is considered by far the most comprehensive artists index in the world by the art market, historians and researchers alike. In addition to English, it is 5 other languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese. To get your free access to this database, visit: http://web.artprice.com/artists/directory/A

All of the above-mentioned users and market palyers will soon also be able to enjoy Artprice's B2B development on open APIs using REST (Representational State Transfer) architecture, an innovative way of constructing an application for fixed and mobile systems using the Web's original architecture. An Artists database of this dimension, updated daily, is the fruit of dozens of acquisitions worldwide by Artprice and nearly a million hours of work by its Historians, Writers and IT Developers from 1997 to 2012 (see details and background in Artprice's Reference Document, certified by and available on the AMF's website).

According to thierry Ehrmann, the Founder and CEO of Artprice, this strategy of making integral information freely available to the Art world will allow Artprice to strengthen its art market standardisation so that it can accelerate the development of its fixed-price and auction-brokerage activities and ensure its position as an unavoidable global player in a deregulated art auction environment by becoming a standardised infrastructure allowing, as of 2012, the processing of online auction brokerage operations (as described in Article 5 of French Law no. 2011-850 of 20 July 2011).

These industrial processes, which standardise the Art Market (artist ID, artwork ID, catalogue raisonné ID, Bibliography ID, etc.) with millions of proprietary data entries, are currently being deployed on the art market, notably in the framework of the partnership signed with Google in 2003 and without any impact on Artprice's revenue or earnings for 2012, but also via the development of the open APIs created in REST architecture, in order to generate a very strong acceleration of the client database. In addition, a mobile application is currently being developed, both for Ipad / Iphone and for Google's Android.

Via these new vectors of standardisation, originating from its fixed-price and auction brokerage Standardised Art Marketplace, Artprice is now able to transfer vast amounts of information to freeware mode with the goal of raising its client database (with accompanying behavioural logs - purchases, sales, searches, art portfolios, etc.) from 1.4 million to 2 million before the end of the year.

Source: http://www.artprice.com ©1987-2012 thierry Ehrmann

Artprice is the global leader in databank on Artprices and indices with more than 27 million indices and auction results covering 495,000 artists. Artprice Images® offers unlimited access to the largest Art Market resource in the world, a library of 108 million images or engravings of artworks from 1700 to the present day along with comments by Artprice's art historians. Artprice permanently enriches its databanks with information from 4,500 international auction houses and auctioneers and publishes a constant flow of art market trends for the main news agencies and 6,300 international written media. For its 1.3 million members (member log in), Artprice posts standardized adverts in what is today the world's leading Standardised Marketplace® for buying and selling works of art by private contract or at auctions (regulated by French law alinéas 2 et 3 de l'article L 321.3 du code du commerce).

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Contact: Josette Mey - tel: +33(0)478-220-000, email: ir@artprice.com