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.

WCAG 2.0 is coming!

That'd be the 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0' - a 'wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible' with success criteria 'written as testable statements that are not technology-specific' (i.e. possibly including JavaScript or Flash as well as HTML and CSS, but the criteria are still sorted into A, AA and AAA).

Putting that in context, a blog post on webstandards.org, 'WCAG 2 and mobileOK Basic Tests specs are proposed recommendations', says:

It's possible that WCAG 2 could be the new accessibility standard by Christmas. What does that mean for you? The answer: it depends. If your approach to accessibility has been one of guidelines and ticking against checkpoints, you'll need some reworking your test plans as the priorities, checkpoints and surrounding structures have changed from WCAG 1. But if your site was developed with an eye to real accessibility for real people rather than as a compliance issue, you should find that there is little difference.

How to Meet WCAG 2.0 (currently a draft) provides a 'customizable quick reference to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 requirements (success criteria) and techniques', and there are useful guidelines on Accessible Forms using WCAG 2.0, with practical advice on e.g., associating labels with form inputs. More resources are listed at WCAG 2.0 resources.

I'm impressed with the range and quality of documentation - they are working hard to make it easy to produce accessible sites.

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.

Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web

Via O'Reilly GMT, this video: Inside the semantic Web with Sir Tim Berners-Lee:

ZDNet's David Berlind got some time with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Topics covered include the semantic Web (see also: Microformats), mashups, and the benefits of open standards versus proprietary development environments such as Flash and Silverlight.