Kelli described some of the difficulties involved in searching across
multiple archives, especially given how that semantic standards may
depend on context and relationships are hard to sustain across
multiple archives. She's right--getting different institutions to
share their stuff is almost as hard technically as it is politically.
Most museums and archives in the United States and Europe have
developed in-house databases and/or Web sites, and a smaller but
significant proportion have databases that can be searched via their
Web sites. So a curator who wants to search for "television" can
consult the comprehensive databases of the Langlois Foundation,
MedienKunstNetz, or the Database of Virtual Art.
What a researcher currently cannot do, however, is to search for the
theme "television" across all, or even a handful, of such databases.
For efficiency, such online databases are typically accessed via
server-side scripts that take the form "index.php?theme=television," a
formula that Google and Yahoo cannot spider. As a result, millions of
dollars and countless hours of staff time and expertise are spent
squirreling data away in private silos inaccessible to a broader public.
We've run into a similar incommensurability in Forging the Future, an
alliance of museums and cultural organizations currently working on
the release of a new preservation tools. We wanted each tool to be
useful on its own, but be even better when combined with other Forging
the Future tools, or even with proprietary databases. But we soon
found it difficult to convince our differing kinds of data and
platforms to play nice; it's hard to get a Web-based union database
and a desktop-based Filemaker client to speak the same language. The
last thing we wanted to do was to jam everything into yet another
silo'd database, so instead we went in search of a software equivalent
of Star Trek's "universal translator"--maybe not strong enough to
translate Klingon into English, but at least able to make the
introductions between related people and artworks in different
databases.
Still Water's John Bell came up with the idea of a Metaserver that
could act like a sort of ISBN for art by generated unique, portable
ids for people, works, and vocabulary. Any database with access to the
Internet--even a desktop application like Filemaker--can hook into the
Metaserver through an open API, at which point a registrar adding
records to that database could simultaneously view or add to related
data from every other database on the system. This Metaserver tunnels
between silos.
As co-developer Craig Dietrich likes to say, the Metaserver isn't an
archive, but rather an "inverse archive," that archives pointers to
records in other folk's archives. Of course, the Semantic Web has
promised this for some time, but there are plenty of doubts about
when, and whether, it will ever arrive. (It's like the joke about
fusion: it's the technology of the future, and always will be.) But
registries like the Metaserver are lightweight and easy to build with
practical techniques we have right now.
So far the Metaserver team has prototyped the API and is working on
testbed implementations with two external databases, the 3rd-
generation Variable Media Questionnaire (an independent Forging the
Future project) and UC Berkeley's Open Museum. Forging partners Nick
Hasty of Rhizome and Michael Katchen of Franklin Furnace have also
built the proof of concept for a cross-institional collective
vocabulary for variable media works, VocabWiki. We've tested a full-
circle workflow for VocabWiki, in which a wiki of terms and
definitions is fed from tags contributed by Rhizome's ArtBASE
community ("generative art", "posthuman"), and then occurrences of
those tags on the Rhizome Web site get hotlinked to VocabWiki for the
latest definitions.
We hope to publish the Forging tools later this year, and open up the
Metaserver API soon afterward. If anyone is interested in either,
please let me know.
jon
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Forging the Future:
New tools for variable media preservation
http://forging-the-future.net/
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