Did I never blog this? Eejit! Here's the LAARC API

I have a feeling I never blogged about the existence of the LAARC API. Currently this is only simple search and we've not as yet "eaten our own dog food" i.e. rebuilt the LAARC catalogue site itself on top of this - that's waiting for the advanced search API, though I couldn't guess at a delivery date for that...
I think I'd meant to do a big explanatory post and since I didn't get round to that just never mentioned it. So for now I'll just get the word out and say, this is the work of Julia Fernee who re-engineered the whole back-end of the LAARC system to make it work sweetly, fixed stuff broken by a change to Mimsy XG, got digital downloads behaving again and ironed out various other un-noticed bugs. Ultimately it's all still based on the work of Sarah Jones and later Mia Ridge, but Julia's work now puts the database in a place where we can build from. Play with the API and let us know what you think.

Not very news: I won a competition

Well, well, well. Apparently back in March I actually won something, but it's only by stumbling across this blog post today that I found out. It's quite cool, actually, that I get to have a product (an "Open Source animal bones database for use by Archaeologists") named with my suggestion, although I really like some of the others (SQLETON, anyone?). No other prize, but as a latent bones person myself it's really nice (human bones, though). Apparently, looking back at my reply to the Antiquist mailing list, I suggested "zooos" because (obviously) the zoo relates to animals and the "os" to:

bone, as in "os animalis". Short and sweet! And maybe the extra "o" makes
it more memorable in a way. Then again, it could just be frivolos :-)

Mixing my languages of course but never mind. Strangely I didn't make the point Joseph makes, which is that the OS also puns with Open Source, and which is why they've amended it to zooOS. Shame I don't do PHP much, or PostgreSQL.

More important than the name is the idea of the Open Archaeology Software Suite itself, not to mention Oxford Archaeology's Open Archaeology project that sits behind it. I mean to look at these more carefully and to prod our Archaeological Applications Development Manager, Pete, to do the same. Cool idea.

I'm a Dapper Dan man

Well, that's definitely overstating the case - I'm no whizz with Dapper, and not exactly the spit of Ulysses Everett McGill. However I am becoming rather a fan, somewhat belatedly (I think I first heard about it from Mike Ellis some time ago). Anyway, before my SKOS experiments I hade my first proper play with Dapper to give an API to the great geophys survey data that English Heritage have made available. One nice thing was that the results aren't paginated (I just twigged how lucky that was), so without much trouble (given I was learning the tool) I came up with a quick dapp for the search. You can search the DB via this dapp using any of the parameters on the original form, though I only built four into the dapp, which you see on the test box - the reason being I wanted to search geographically to integrate the XML that's returned with some MOLA site data. But that only gives the barest info, and I wanted the details too really, so I made another dapp for the details, which takes the ID, and hooked them together for seach results with details. Very gratifying!

Next step is KML for this lot, but I will talk to the content owners before doing anything like that, which might put a load on their servers were I to layer their content onto our maps. One helpful thing, though, is that their app takes a parameter for the size of square to return results for, which means you could write a map application that would only query for the area you're showing at the time.

Shakespeare's first theatre

Here's the BBC story and video about a bit of news we'll probably see in a few other places soo, the discovery of what's thought to be the first theatre to show the work of William Shakespeare (and where he also worked as an actor). Though Museum of London Archaeology is going through a tough time at the moment they are, as ever, involved in some very exciting work. Maybe a little less romantic that Romeo and Juliet itself, but thrilling enough.