wrapping and unwrapping history: what’s gained and what’s lost
DESCRIPTION
Presentation given at the 'Unlocking Sources: WW1 & Europeana' conference located at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Germany on 31st January 2014. http://www.europeana-collections-1914-1918.eu/unlocking-sources/TRANSCRIPT
Unlocking Sources: WW1 & EuropeanaStaatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Germany. 31st January 2014
Adrian StevensonSenior Technical Innovations Coordinator
Mimas, University of Manchester, UK@adrianstevenson
Wrapping and Unwrapping History: What’s Gained and What’s Lost
927233355446
ww1.discovery.ac.uk
WW1 Discovery Project
• Proof-of-Concept illustrating principles of the JISC Discovery initiative
• Discovery about advocating ‘open’ and ‘aggregating’
• Make digital content more discoverable by people and machines
• Built WW1 aggregation API and discovery layers
www.discovery.ac.uk
What is an API?• ‘Application Programming Interface’• Allows machine readability of data– Typically over the Web
• Provides access to content or functions for other systems
• Many ways to do this – e.g.– Google, Facebook, Flickr, twitter APIs ….– OAI-PMH, Z39.50– RDF - Linked Data, Semantic Web
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WW1 Discovery: How?
• Aggregate and ‘wrap’ data from existing APIs – NMM, V&A, Europeana
• Help others with example API – BL, Welsh Voices, Postal Museum
• Formats: SOLR, RSS, OpenSearch, OAI-PMH, CSV
http://ww1.discovery.ac.uk/how-to-use-our-api/
Challenges• Lack of APIs• Difficulties merging data– Varied content and formats– APIs can change– Relevance ranking dubious
• From Discovery ‘Technical Principles’ - “Discovery is distributed … Discovery is concerned with a plethora of information resources and services from a wide variety of sources and is prepared, where appropriate, to deal with these in situ”
• Speed of API response• Lack of content– images– geo-data and time data
• Content licenses not open
Contact
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Adrian StevensonMimas, University of Manchester, [email protected]
www.mimas.ac.uk
www.twitter.com/adrianstevensonwww.linkedin.com/in/adrianstevenson
www.slideshare.net/adrianstevenson
CC License
This presentation available under creative commons Non Commercial-Share Alike:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/