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"Waibel,Guenter" <[log in to unmask]> writes
>On the other hand, if your goal is to create a collective collection of
>a significant subset of those 2,500 or 17,500 or whatever other figure
>you'd like to toss around, how useful are those APIs? (This is a
>genuine question, not a rhetorical one - I aim to expand my horizons!)
>
>This may be where the conversation veers into the distributed vs
>centralized data store arena. As I understand it, APIs allow you to
>execute a distributed search, which may scale to the 9 national museums
>in Creative Spaces (I assume they use an Open Search API), but they
>usually don't allow you to take possession of the data. Does this
>approach scale to even all of the London museums (241 as very
>empirically counted on
>http://www.londonnet.co.uk/ln/guide/about/museums.html)?
>
>What's the mechanism you envision for a collective collection beyond
>the 9 national museums to flow together? I'd be curious to hear how
>folks on the list think the API approach will scale...
Just to confirm this, the Brooklyn T&Cs specifically prohibit my storing
their data: it can only be used as part of a live data stream. I agree
that this won't scale: if you want Google-like aggregation and indexing
of museum information resources, you need a harvesting or spidering
technology to be supported by them, quite separate from and in addition
to any API they might offer.
In today's money, OAI and an agreed XML delivery format would seem to be
a viable choice. Said XML format could be a sector-wide interchange
format (hello Collections Trust), and/or "Triple Store" RDF as per the
Linked Data initiative (which I may have mentioned before on this list
;-) ). The latter option could potentially put museum information into a
MUCH bigger information pot - is this good or scary?
Richard
--
Richard Light
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