Hi Frankie,
this is great and it would be even greater if every institution would
make similar facilities available.
Which triggers one question. Would it not be possible to use an
existing standard (like RSS 2.0) so that wider diffusion is
facilitated by ease of access?
The RSS format provides basic description for links back to the
original content provider (the SM in this case), and could be extended
with custom fields.
Do you think it would be unsuitable?
Otherwise the 'risk' is that each institution generate their own
proprietary format and that they'd be difficult to integrate on a
large scale.
Kind regards,
Cristiano
On 30 May 2008, at 18:22, Roberto Frankie wrote:
> 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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