The great API challenge in action

Thanks to a bit of creative re-purposing, museum-api.pbwiki.com is open for sharing, discussing, arguing over and hopefully coming to some common agreements on APIs and data schemas for museum collections.

What you can do:

• Upload or copy and paste some examples from your collections data schemas - whether that's nicely marked up xml, a table structure from the databases that feed your website, even plain old HTML from an online page.


• Link to your API, tell us what's worked, which ideas we should pinch


• List the functionality of your API (through documentation, examples, whatever)


• Talk about how you decided how to implement your API


• Start a discusion with your questions, unresolved issues

Tip of the Day: saving web.config as Unicode

Today's lesson: if you need to edit your .Net web.config file, think twice before doing it in anything but Notepad. If you have edited web.config in another application, it might be saved as ASCII, not Unicode.

The error on your site may be something like:

Configuration Error
Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: There is no Unicode byte order mark. Cannot switch to Unicode.

Source Error:


[No relevant source lines]

To fix this, open the web.config in Notepad, choose 'Save As' from the File menu. In the 'Save As' dialogue box, make sure the filename is web.config, 'save as type' is 'All files' and Encoding is 'Unicode'.

There are probably other ways of fixing the error, but this is the 'lowest common denominator' fix, and if you're racing to get a live server back up, Notepad might be all you have.

I should point out that I didn't discover this by bringing the live web server down, so if you work for the Science Museum, don't panic!

The great API challenge

Another MCG (museums computer group) discussion list post repurposed as a blog post... In a discussion about the Brooklyn Museum API following on from discussion of the NMOLP 'Creative Spaces' project, Richard Light asked:

Don't we need a standard for what a museum API looks like, and what it delivers? Even better, shouldn't we stop thinking that we need to invent everything we use, and just adopt something like the Linked Data paradigm?

I quickly checked with Daniel, our head of web, that it was ok for me to throw this open to the world, and posted in response:

Science Museum is looking at releasing an API soon - project-specific to start with, but with the intention of using that as an iterative testing and learning process, and I'd be happy to talk to other museums about what they're doing to try and come up with something with at least some core similarities in the schema and functionality. Anyone up for it?

So, are you up for it? I've had a few good responses already. My vague idea is maybe using digitalheritage.ning.com to share data schemas, API functionality, discuss the various acronyms we're using, etc.

You can leave a comment here, or join the ning, or @miaridge on twitter.

Competitions using APIs - any resources

The original impetus for creating this blog was to provide somewhere to talk about our plans, ask for feedback, and generally make the process of running a mashup competition using a set of object data created for an exhibition really transparent.

The project is close to signed-off, and I'll go into more detail then, but in the meantime, here's a post I sent to the MCG (museums computer group) email list:

Does anyone have good examples, bad examples, personal experience, whatever, on competition models, licensing, preservation, timelines, platforms, other public domain data sources, visualisation tools, etc? You can email me offlist if that's easier, I can post a compiled list back here.

I was at JISC's recent dev8D event and got some good ideas there, and I'm happy to share the research I've already done if anyone is interested.

Hello!

I suppose I should say what this is all about - I wanted somewhere I could ask questions, point people to discussions, make a home for collections of links and stuff in development. I work for the Science Museum in London, and for the 'National Museums of Science and Industry' generally.

So, um, that's it for now.