Now that sounds cool, I'm off to read up on it now. I see that Frogle,
for one, uses Base. Clearly there's a whole world or not-metadata out
there that Google uses and which looks much like metadata, or a
more-than-averagely structure folksonomy.
I've just finished reading your SW FAQs, by the way, Dan. Very good, and
I like the last one. My one reservation (on which I'd defer to you) is
that you do make it sound as though turning the web into a database
means that it's only database-driven content that will really fit the
model. I realise that this is the obvious and easy way of making a lot
of material available in SW-friendly form (not least our collections
data), but surely there are some important types of content that, whilst
manually authored, would still merit the semantic treatment?
Jeremy Ottevanger
Web Developer, Museum Systems Team
Museum of London Group
46 Eagle Wharf Road
London. N1 7ED
Tel: 020 7410 2207
Fax: 020 7600 1058
Email: [log in to unmask]
www.museumoflondon.org.uk
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From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Dan Zambonini
Sent: 18 December 2006 12:51
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] Re: [MCG] Google Coop / Museum collections
> "it would be great if they were interested in the idea"
I can't find the original source, but I remember reading - many years
ago - an interview with one of the Google founders (probably Sergey
Brin), where he plainly stated that Google weren't interested in
'metadata'; he basically said Google would only use content that was
designed for humans, not content (data) that was designed for machines
(i.e. metadata). Not sure if the company's strategy has moved on since
then.
Following on from Mike's original idea, maybe it would be interested to
take this one step on, and use Google Base, populated using the APIs
(http://code.google.com/apis/base/), to store specific structures about
museum objects (i.e. we could define specific fields, like date,
creator, all the usual dc stuff). It might even be relatively
straightforward to create an OAI interface that fed into the Google Base
API, maybe? i.e. anyone who had an OAI compatible object repository
could then feed straight into Google Base.
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