Hi all,
There was lots of talk at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference about
making data feeds of our content available - and indeed this is kind of
the theme of the Museums on the Web conference in Leicester next month
(and has been discussed on this list extensively before).
Bearing all this in mind, I've decided to put my money time where my
mouth is and produce some experimental API feeds for some Science Museum
data: http://api.sciencemuseum.org.uk/.
The first couple of feeds were created through necessity: an exhibition
which allows people to 'pledge' to do clean up their flying habits. So
the API methods here are used by the on-gallery kiosks (using Flash) to
retrieve and save data to a web server.
We've also enabled the beta MediaWiki API on our Object Wiki
(http://objectwiki.sciencemuseum.org.uk/mediawiki/api.php), which has
already been used to generate a Twitter feed:
http://twitter.com/museummemories
The final API though is based on one of my ideas coming home from the
mw2008 conference (#8 on http://www.frankieroberto.com/weblog/868),
which is to make basic exhibition and gallery information available. So
I've knocked together a quick database of all the Science Museum
exhibitions, past and present, that I could easily find out about. You
can see the raw feed here: http://api.sciencemuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/
in XML or here: http://api.sciencemuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/?output=json
in JSON format (which can be easily parsed by Javascript). The
documentation of the format is here:
http://api.sciencemuseum.org.uk/documentation/exhibitions/
As a quick demonstration of how you could use this data, I've produced a
Yahoo! Pipes mashup which filters out all the exhibitions and galleries
which are now closed:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/frankieroberto/previoussciencemuseumexhibitions
I'd welcome any feedback on these feeds, and would love to see other
museums making their exhibition and gallery info available too.
Have a good weekend!
Frankie Roberto
Science Museum
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