UK Culture Grid wants to know what developers need - get in!

Neil Smith from Knowledge Integration dropped by the Museums and the machine-processable web wiki to ask what users (developers) need to get data in and out of the Culture Grid:

To support the ambitious targets for increasing the number of item records in Culture Grid, we thought know would be a good time to review the venerable old application profile we use for importing metadata into the Grid. I've added a discussion page reviewing options at http://museum-api.pbworks.com/w/page/Culture-Grid-Profile.

We really want the community to be involved in helping ensure that whatever profile (or profiles) we support will meet the needs of users - not only for getting things into the grid but also for getting things out in a format that is useful to them. Although the paper focusses mainly on XML representations of metadata, we're also interested in your views on whether non-XML representations (e.g RDF or JSON) need to be supported.

So whether you work in a museum or are an external developer who'd like to use museum data, I'd encourage you to think about the four options Neil outlines, and to comment, ask questions, share sample data, vote for your favourite option, whatever, on the Culture Grid Profile page.  One of the options is to develop a new model - definitely more time-consuming, but a great opportunity to make your needs known.

As an indication of the type of content that's available through the Culture Grid, I've copied this text from some of their about pages: "It contains over 1 million records from over 50 UK collections, covering a huge range of topics and periods.  Records mostly refer to images but also text, audio and video resources and are mostly about museum objects with library, archive and other kinds of collections also included."  So, that's:

• "information about items in collections (referencing the images, video, audio or other material you offer online about the things in your collections)
• information about collections as a whole (their scope, significance and access details)
• information about collecting organisations (contact and access details)"

There's a lot of cultural heritage and tech jargon involved on the Culture Grid Profile discussion page - don't hold back on asking for clarifications where needed.  I'm certainly not an expert on the various schemas and it's a very long time since I helped work out the Exploring 20th Century London extensions for the original PNDS, but I've given it a go.

If you've read this far, you might also be interested in the first ever Culture Grid Hack Day in Newcastle Upon Tyne on December 3, 2010.

Fun with Freebase

A video of a presentation to the Freebase User Group with some good stuff on data mining, visualisation (and some bonus API action) via the Freebase blog.

If you haven't seen it before, Freebase is 'an open database of the world's information', 'free for anyone to query, contribute to, built applications on top of, or integrate into their websites'. Check out this sample entry on the early feminist (and Londoner) Mary Wollstonecraft. The Freebase blog is generally worth a look, whether you're interested in Freebase or just thinking about APIs and data mashups.

What Does Openness Mean to The Musum Community?

There's an almost-live report from Mike Ellis and Brian Kelly's "What Does Openness Mean to The Museum Community?" forum at the Museums and the Web conference yesterday at http://mw2008.wetpaint.com/page/report

It's a really important discussion and as it's a wiki I assume you can add comments. I am running late for a session but will sort out my notes later.

The Power of Information

From the BBC:

Government must do more to embrace Web 2.0 tools and communities, says a report.
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The report said that some public data, such as post codes, was already widely used but much more could be done to open up access to official information.

It said public data should be published in open formats to encourage use.

The review, called The Power of Information, aimed to find out more about Web 2.0 tools and communities to see how the government can get involved to help Britons make the most of this "new pattern of information creation and use".
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The review was intended to "explore the role of government in helping to maximise the benefits for citizens from this new pattern of information creation and use."
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The report encouraged the government to do more to ensure a good fit between web communities and official information to "grasp the opportunities that are emerging in terms of the creation, consumption and re-use of information".
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The authors recommended that the government work more closely with existing sites and communities that share official aims; do more to help innovators use public data and work to ensure people know what to do with public data and how to get at it.

Among 15 specific recommendations the report said the government should not set up its own sites if existing web communities do a good job of getting information to people.

It also said it should speed up efforts to put data in open formats and publish under terms that let people freely use it.

They've linked to a PDF of the report at Power of Information report.