cur8.art Secures Trademark for CQI — a Single Measure of Compliance for Artwork

We are pleased to announce that cur8.art — our sister platform for cultural heritage environmental monitoring — has been granted a registered trademark for CQI, the Conservation Quality Index. CQI is the industry's first unified score for how well an environment is preserving the artwork inside it, and the trademark formally recognises it as a distinct standard for the sector.

A Single Measure of Compliance for Artwork

Conservators have long worked with a patchwork of standards — ASHRAE climate classes, the IPI Preservation Index, the CCI's 10 Agents of Deterioration — each valuable in isolation, but none of them answering the question that matters most: how well is this room actually preserving these specific objects?

CQI closes that gap. It distils temperature, relative humidity, RH and temperature stability, light, UV, and biological risk into a single 0–100 score, weighted against the material profile of the room. Think of it as PUE for museums — a shared number that conservation, operations, and leadership teams can all act on.

What CQI Does

• Object-aware, not just room-aware — a gallery at 22°C and 50% RH scores differently for photography than for ceramics. CQI accounts for what is actually in the space.
• Single 0–100 score — banded from Critical (0–24) through to Museum-grade Optimal (95–100), aligned with ASHRAE classes and loan eligibility.
• Built on established science — ASHRAE Chapter 24, BS EN 16893, PAS 198, Thomson's The Museum Environment, and CCI Technical Bulletins.
• Real-time and benchmarkable — recomputed every five minutes, with a rolling 30-day published score and instantaneous sub-scores for alerting.

The full technical write-up — including worked examples and the parameter weighting model — is published over at cur8.art/news.

Powered by PODTECH's Monitoring Platform

CQI is computed on the same real-time monitoring platform PODTECH has built and refined for the data centre market. Our focus to date has been the critical environments inside data centres — power, cooling, humidity, contamination, and PUE — where the cost of getting it wrong is measured in downtime and lost capacity.

That same telemetry stack — edge gateways, sensor ingestion, time-series storage, and rules-based scoring — is what now sits behind every CQI calculation on cur8.art. Sensors stream environmental data every few seconds, the score is calculated edge-side, and dashboards surface institution-wide CQI, per-zone breakdowns, trend analysis, and loan-ready period reports.

Why the Trademark Matters

Registering CQI as a trademark protects the integrity of the score. It means institutions, lenders, and insurers can rely on a CQI value to be calculated to a defined methodology — not a marketing label applied to any in-house score. As CQI is adopted across museums, galleries, and private collections, that consistency is what makes benchmarking and loan decisions credible.

Our thanks to the conservation scientists, curators, and operators who have helped shape CQI through its development. We are looking forward to seeing it used in earnest as more sites come online.