UK press on Europeana's launch

Some UK press on the launch of Europeana:

BBC online: European online library launches
Guardian: Dante to dialects: EU's online renaissance
Associated Press: European history, culture and art goes digital (well not really UK but never mind)

I'll keep editing this stuff as I find more. Plenty of concentration on the awesome content as well as the fact the site was brought to its knees by huge traffic, which I'd see as a success of sorts - best see how the traffic holds up over the next few weeks, though.

MashLogic: worth hooking into?

This article on RWW about MashLogic suggests one more tempting possibility for Europeana to distribute itself more widely and get itself integrated web-wide, for those users in love with culture (in the widest sense). MashLogic is a Firefox extension that tries to create links between the page you're looking at and resources that you've chosen, built on web services and soon to become open to developers and partners. Some sort of semantic processing is presumably at the heart of it, and it sounds as though you can effectively help to teach it. Evidently it's in a similar space to Adaptive Blue, amongst others, but offering considerable scope for the user to tailor their experience and for content owners (like Europeana) to hook into it.
I guess people are much more likely to install a plugin that can do the same for a variety of providers in preference to one that's only good for one. So if Euroepana can piggyback on something like this, its appeal could made much broader.

New Photosynth release

Photosynth v.2: Brady Forest over on O'Reilly Radar has a thorough post on the new release of Photosynth from MS, which (most significantly) includes the ability to create your own "Synths", all of which are shared with/hosted by the community, and which are built with heavy use of your local machine. Clever, and very exciting as far as creating views of museum objects goes. Obviously I have yet to try it out, and who knows, it might turn out to be cheaper and easier to spend a few tens of thousands on a 3D scanner instead, but somehow I doubt it.... Coolcoolcool

Showing us the way

I presume it's uncontroversial to say that it would be useful to have terminologies available as web services. Right now, you can browse various sources of reference terms that are useful to museums (amongst others): sources like the british & irish archaeological bibliography (including its approved term lists); the National Monument Record Thesauri; and the museum codes and SPECTRUM terminology termbank maintained by the Collections Trust (to highlight some UK examples). I'm certain it would be useful to have these available as web services (some more so than others); likewise other thesauri that AFAIK aren't available to programme to: ULAN and AAT, for example, which are collected under the CCO initiative.

There's every chance that I misunderstand some or all of these "services" in terms of how they're used and by whom (I'm very shaky on the status of CCO and its relationship to AAT, for a start). But I'm sure that there are many ways in which a programmatic interface to their contents could be used. Which is why (to get to the point of this post) the service that OCLC's top geeks have come up with here is a great example for us in the museum world to look at (blogged here on Hanging Together). This is a collection of esssentially library-related thesauri onto which they have created web services. I like the look of FAST best of all; it could be really useful for us in the dusty bones world too.

Lorcan Dempsey also blogs today about the WorldCat identities API and other cool services. I fancy the name look-up service: aside from anything else it gives us a URL to refer to for those individuals in the WorldCat database. Here's a not-so-random entry.


So once again we can learn a lot from libraries leading the way. One of the cool things, though, is that OCLC are a cross-domain organisation, and people like Dempsey think constantly about breaking down the barriers between libraries, archives and museums. If they've sprinkled their magic onto library terminologies, I'm sure they'll be only too happy to help the museum world to take similar steps.

OSGB-lat/long web service for GIS

We have loads of geographical information. Trouble is, it's almost all in OSGB grid reference form, which is no good for feeding to apps like Google Maps. Worse, much of it uses old-style 100km squares (mainly TQ, which covers London). We've taken a couple of approaches to this - hand-making a few maps in Google (for example, our Olympics work is mapped here), and using batch processing scripts from ESRI or others to manipulate the data in the geographical fields of our archaeology database, creating latitude and longitude values to accompany the OS grid references. However there is still a good set of data that needs another approach - for example, our site summaries for the last decade and more are available online. These XML-driven pages contain only OSGB data. I plot them very crudely onto our own ESRI-based map application, but would much rather have KML to work with.

So to the point. I came across a great script on the Hairy Spider site that also runs a web service. I wanted to take this further so that (a) I could pass in lots of values, not just one at a time (b) it could handle the TQ-style syntax (c) not keep on hitting friendly Mr Spider's server. The code available is for the convertion from OS eastings and northings to lat/long only and I've not tried to reproduce his "proper" web service, but I do now have something that will work for my needs. I can pass in a querystring like

gr=tq709098,SW465987,tl123456,51232456,512300245600

and get back something like:



50.8618352280453
0.431144625126249
tq709098


50.7318874223712
-5.59642485933937
SW465987


52.0968934973257
-0.358719120254802
tl123456


52.0968934973257
-0.358719120254802
51232456


52.0968934973257
-0.358719120254802
512300245600



[note that the last three values in the query were all for the same grid reference but in different formats, producing the same lat/long]
For me this is pretty useful. I may well extend this to take more parameters and pass out KML, but the main thing is having a means to convert the data on the fly over HTTP.

Many thanks to Hairy Spider for doing all the hard work on this. I've tested the outputs and they're very close to the OS's own tool, so good work HS!

Next thing is to use this. I'll let you know when I do, and we might also be open about making the service publicly available if that would be of assistance to anyone that might be reading this.