Introduction technical choices Rijksmuseum API. Presentation at Masterclass Open Data meeting . Amsterdam 8-6-2012

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2. The Rijksmuseum uses Adlib Museum for registering it’s collection
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3. Adlib consists of 400+ fields for documenting each individual object in the museum.
The Rijksmuseum registers information about the object, it’s maker, the acquisition
and condition of the object and the rights attached to the object. To register
Intellectual Property Rights, the Rijksmuseum developed a seperate Rights screen.
Only objects belonging to the public domain and registered in Adlib with a public
domain statement are being added to Open Data set.
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4. The Rijksmuseum started it’s Open Data project when a partner of the Rijksmuseum
asked permission to connect to the database and use the Rijksmuseum Collection
Information for it’s own information system. The Rijksmuseum chose OAI (harvesting)
and developed a workflow for sets and users of the Open Data platform. Based on
this workflow our webdevelopers started building our API platform in Orchard (the
current CMS system of the Rijksmuseum).
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5. The Rijksmuseum developed XML structures for the Open Data platform, using the
Adlib API. The Adlib API is being harvested by Orchard and sends records in a Dublin
Core format to the Open Data platform. In the Adlib API we defined which fields are
being harvested. We also attached a stylesheet to the XML generated bij the Adlib
API. This stylesheet transforms the Adlib specific XML to Dublin Core XML.
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6. This is what a record of the Rijksmuseum looks like after being added to the Open
Data platform.
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7. In Orchard we can define different sets, with different records and in different XML
formats (Dublin Core, Europeana format, Adlib XML and so on). We define sets by
defining the queries for the Adlib API.
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8. On the website developers can register for an API key. The Rijksmuseum does not
screen before giving access to the Open Data collection. The Rijksmuseum does so,
because the organisation wants to learn about the users and the usage of the Open
Data collection.
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9. This is what our registration module looks like: we can she how many people
registered, where they come from and we can see their API key.
In june 2012, 6 month after launching our Open Data launched, 214 individual
developers registered for an api key.
Most of them do not build an app or share their results with us. We know of 18 apps
built with our collection.
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