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Cosmic Collections: creating a big bang?

by Mia

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Paper for Museums and the Web conference 2010, Denver. Cosmic Collections was a mashup competition run by the Science Museum to encourage people to use a beta collections API to make websites for the ...

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Cosmic Collections: creating a big bang? Presentation Transcript

Cosmic Collections

Questions...

If we built an API, would anyone use it?

C an you really crowdsource the creation of collections interfaces?

Mashups combine data from one or more sources

and/or data and visualisation tools such as maps

or timelines.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are a way for one machine to talk to another:

‘ Hi Bob, I’d like a list of objects from you, and hey, Alice, could you draw me a timeline to put the objects on?’

What if you had a party and nobody came?

AKA ‘the fears and how to deal with them’

Acknowledge those fears

Plan for the worst case scenario

Take a deep breath and do it anyway

What did we learn?

People need (more) help to participate in a geektastic project like this

The dynamics of a competition are tricky

Mashups are shaped by the data provided - you get out what you put in

Can we help people bring their own content to a future mashup?

“ More of this kind of thing! Museums are supposed to be publically accessible resources for the enrichment and education of humanity. Their knowledge and data should be too and this was a great step!"

"giving a tough-to-reach community real ownership of the museum project"

"The very idea of the competition was awesome"

Tim Berners-Lee:

“ The thing people are amazed about with the web is that, when you put something online, you don’t know who is going to use it—but it does get used.”

Tim Berners-Lee:

“ The thing people are amazed about with the web is that, when you put something online, you don’t know who is going to use it—but it does get used.”

But: It doesn’t happen automatically It’s not a magic bullet

Using the feedback to focus and improve collection-wide API

Adding other forms of machine-readable data

Connecting with data from your collections?

Thank you

Join in at http://museum-api.pbworks.com/

More at http://openobjects.blogspot.com/ or @mia_out

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes"

Marcel Proust

Image credits: Nasa, Science Museum. Tim Berners-Lee quote http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/01/mash-the-state/ Full paper online at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/ridge/ridge.html