Tristan Roddis

Tristan Roddis is the Technical Director of Cogapp – an organisation that has been working with digital collections for over forty years. Having worked on multiple digital collections for major museums including the Met, MoMA and the National Portrait Gallery, he is passionate about exploring the ways in which museums can leverage their collections information to provide compelling user interfaces.

Tristan Roddis will be speaking at the Digital Collections Summit 2026 :

Bridging Bay Area collections: a practical experiment in AI-powered search and enrichment

How can AI techniques enhance collections data and the interface to search and display the artworks themselves? FAMSF worked in partnership with Cogapp and Anthropic to build a prototype that integrated around 8,500 collection records from three Bay Area museums, each with different data formats and schemas. We used an AI pipeline to normalise the data, add visual and semantic embeddings, and generate cited artwork descriptions. The resulting interface interprets natural language queries and surfaces semantically ranked results across all institutions. I’ll present the key findings from creating this novel prototype, as well as the unresolved tensions that it surfaced.