Some on-going work on museum APIs

Just a quick note to say we haven't abandoned this blog, but at the moment I've been concentrating on working out issues around schemas/formats, content, and functions for re-usable and interoperable cultural heritage data on a wiki.

There's a list of things you can do if you work in a museum or are a developer interested in using museum data - jump in!

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

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.