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

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.