[okfn-discuss] Art/Artist/Gallery/Show Datasets

Fri Dec 4 16:55:41 UTC 2009

[Draft email from the other day (before Non's email re: JISC leads).
Thought I might as well send it anyway - and great to hear of
possibilities in the UK! J.]

My guess would be the same as Rufus's - I'm not aware of anything
explicitly open, but would love to hear if you find anything.

Some thoughts about leads:

  * Possibility of compiling this kind of information from public
domain (i.e. old, out of copyright) sources? Especially
bibliographies, catalogues, encylocpedias and so forth. I would expect
that there must be *plenty* of useful information out there - albeit
in a non-structured, non-machine readable form. Possibility of using
OCR to get 50% of way there (especially if publications use standard
formatting/typesetting) and crowdsourcing remaining 50% putting
everything under a nice explicit open license. ;-)
  * Looking to cultural heritage institutions in the US - especially
government affiliated ones. Then could look to see if any of them
could potentially be classed as Federal (like Library of Congress) and
take the 'Federal government material in the public domain' route.
Also possibility of doing FOI requests, even potentially on public
sector organisations in the UK (e.g. via What Do They Know).

Jonathan

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> 2009/12/2 Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org>:
>> Heya.
>>
>> I've been looking at online services such as aertfacts and artinfo that
>> provide information about artists, galleries and shows. They all have
>> the most reactionary terms of use. ;-) Are there any freely available
>> services or datasets containing such information? Contemporary or
>> historical art is fine. I've found a dataset for Ars Electronica and
>> some infobox sets on Infochimps, and there's the Yorck paintings on
>> Wikimedia but does anyone know of anything else?
>
> My guess that re. galleries and shows there will be almost nothing
> "open". On artists I reckon you should be able to pull out
> somethingout via dbpedia (wikipedia) or freebase. Do register what you
> find on ckan.net if you can spare 30s :)
>
> Rufus
>
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-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org