In case you missed the announcement on twitter or elsewhere, the winners have been revealed…
Our thanks to everyone who participated, commented, critiqued or cheered the project along.
Archive for the ‘API’ Category
Cosmic Champions – winners of Cosmic Collections competition announced
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Cosmic Collections – do one thing and do it well
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009The Cosmic Collections competition has been running for a few weeks now, and while we’ve been sucked into a vortex of other projects, I’ve been keeping an eye out for feedback from the public.
As a result, I’ve realised that there may be some mismatch between the way mashups tend to work, and the scope we’ve suggested for entries to our competition. The types of interfaces someone might produce with the API may lend themselves more to exploring one particular idea in depth than produce something suitable for the broadest range of our audiences.
So I’m proposing to change the scope for entries to the competition, to make it more realistic and a better experience for entrants: I’d like to ask you to build a section of a site, rather than a whole site. The scope for entrants would then be: “create something that does one thing, and does it well”. Our criteria – use of collections data, creativity, accessibility, user experience and ease of deployment and maintenance – are still important but we’ll consider them alongside the type of mashup you submit.
This might mean producing a mashup for one particular way of exploring the objects, or exploring a sub-set of the objects. It’d then be up to us to combine the winning mashups into a larger site that works for our audiences.
What do you think? If there aren’t any huge objections, I’ll go ahead and update the criteria. Of course, if you’ve been working on something and feel it’s unfair to change the criteria at this stage, let me know and we’ll work something out.
As a reminder, here are the basic details for the Cosmic Collections competition:
How to take part
1. Check out the data here
2. Get some help:
Read our tips for entrants, check out these mashup resources, and get some info about our audiences. Check out the documentation and connect with other people who want to enter the competiton. You can also join the Google group or use the hashtag #coscultcom in conversations on Twitter.
3. Get inspired
Visit the exhibition and check out these videos about the exhibition
4. Get creative and get mashing!
5. Send us a link to your entry.
Email us by midnight on November 28 (GMT) – you don’t need to pre-register.
(And the title? I’m a big fan of the Unix philosophy, “do one thing and do it well”.)
The great API challenge in action
Monday, March 23rd, 2009Thanks to a bit of creative re-purposing, museum-api.pbwiki.com is open for sharing, discussing, arguing over and hopefully coming to some common agreements on APIs and data schemas for museum collections.
What you can do:
- Upload or copy and paste some examples from your collections data schemas – whether that’s nicely marked up xml, a table structure from the databases that feed your website, even plain old HTML from an online page.
- Link to your API, tell us what’s worked, which ideas we should pinch
- List the functionality of your API (through documentation, examples, whatever)
- Talk about how you decided how to implement your API
- Start a discusion with your questions, unresolved issues
The great API challenge
Thursday, March 5th, 2009Another MCG (museums computer group) discussion list post repurposed as a blog post… In a discussion about the Brooklyn Museum API following on from discussion of the NMOLP ‘Creative Spaces’ project, Richard Light asked:
Don’t we need a standard for what a museum API looks like, and what it delivers? Even better, shouldn’t we stop thinking that we need to invent everything we use, and just adopt something like the Linked Data paradigm?
I quickly checked with Daniel, our head of web, that it was ok for me to throw this open to the world, and posted in response:
Science Museum is looking at releasing an API soon – project-specific to start with, but with the intention of using that as an iterative testing and learning process, and I’d be happy to talk to other museums about what they’re doing to try and come up with something with at least some core similarities in the schema and functionality. Anyone up for it?
So, are you up for it? I’ve had a few good responses already. My vague idea is maybe using digitalheritage.ning.com to share data schemas, API functionality, discuss the various acronyms we’re using, etc.
You can leave a comment here, or join the ning, or @miaridge on twitter.
Some on-going work on museum APIs
Friday, April 24th, 2009Just a quick note to say we haven’t abandoned this blog, but at the moment I’ve been concentrating on working out issues around schemas/formats, content, and functions for re-usable and interoperable cultural heritage data on a wiki.
There’s a list of things you can do if you work in a museum or are a developer interested in using museum data – jump in!
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