Yesterday, Mia Ridge wrote:
> I wanted to let you know that NMSI has released 218,822 object records
> from the Science Museum, National Media Museum, and National Railway
> Museum
>
Yay - well done to Mia for getting these object records released. It's an
interesting lesson that for large, fairly static databases like object
records, complete data dumps are probably more useful for developers than an
object-level API, at least initially.
I thought I'd have a quick play with the data last night, and so managed to
import them into a database and built a quick web app called 'Things':
http://what-is-this.heroku.com/
The main thing I wanted out of the data was to be able to browse by
type-of-thing (eg 'steam engines'). Given that this information isn't easily
accessible from the existing data, the first thing that 'Things' does is ask
people to help classify the objects.
It's sort of like tagging. But easier. :-)
If I get enough things classified I may have a go at seeing if an algorithm
can learn from the data and classify the rest.
Let me know what you think.
Source code is here: https://github.com/frankieroberto/things - patches
welcome!
Frankie
--
Frankie Roberto
Experience Designer, Rattle
0114 2706977
http://www.rattlecentral.com
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