Hi all,
Apologies for the self-promotion, but I thought some colleagues may be
interested in the Open Plaques side-project that I've recently been working
on.
The project basically aims to build an open repository of information about
all the 'blue plaques' (and other colours) from across the UK which
commemorate historic people and events.
Interestingly, it's not just English Heritage which manage this scheme (also
they are most closely associated with it), but there are in fact hundreds of
local councils, heritage organisations, civic societies, professional bodies
and so on who have all taken it upon themselves to celebrate their own
little bit of history.
So we have the classic problem of numerous institutions each holding
incomplete, missing and incompatible data. The project aims to solve this by
both crowd-sourcing the collection of the data, and importing existing data
where available (some of which I obtained from FOI requests - you know me!)
The most recent bit of exciting news about the project (at least for me), is
that Flickr have integrated with it, so that any photo tagged with the
relevant tag on Flickr gets automatically linked to the relevant plaque
page.
I've written a fuller account of the project over on my blog:
http://www.frankieroberto.com/weblog/1454 and you can browse the live
website (in 'Alpha') here: http://www.openplaques.org/.
It's only a [relatively] small project, solving a [relatively] small problem
(at least compared to building museum object repositories), but I thought it
might prove to be an interesting model of a grass-routes approach to this
kind of challenge. I'd welcome your thoughts on this.
Oh, and I did mention that there's an API right? ;-)
Frankie
--
Frankie Roberto
Experience Designer, Rattle
0114 2706977
http://www.rattlecentral.com
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