[open-heritage] Open data from cultural heritage organisations?

[Stefano Costa]

Il giorno sab, 20/11/2010 alle 17.05 +0000, ianibbo at gmail.com ha
scritto:
> 
> One of the things thats always interested me a bit (We should do a
> conf call again soon :)) is the OKFN's obsession with big data files.
> CultureGrid is entirely downloadable, just not as massive data files,
> providing an OAI interface instead. There seems to be some resistance
> in OKFN to anything other than data files as a means for distributing
> content? I've been minded to write an OAI -> Datafile service, but it
> feels a bit icky somehow. Is there a resistance to OAI or is it just
> not well enough understood?

Hi Ian,
apparently OAI has success in the cultural heritage domain.
http://www.culturaitalia.it/ is the Italian portal for everything
cultural, and they expose an OAI-PMH interface...
http://www.culturaitalia.it/pico/FootMenu/documentazione/it/index.html

I know OKFN has a preference for Python and there is a good OAI software
named MOAI http://moai.infrae.com/ (I'm having a crazy idea of deploying
an OKFN instance to harvest open stuff...).

> In terms of the license - It's difficult because the data belongs to
> the providers not the aggregator. I think Nick Poole was taking an
> interest in the licensing issue, it's something we should re-visit. 

Right now CulturaItalia is (gently speaking) a total mess. Their own
content (i.e. web pages) is under CC-BY-NC, but most of what is exposed
through OAI is in fact metadata aggregated from a million sources
(museums, regional archives, etc), under strict copyright. See
http://www.culturaitalia.it/pico/FootMenu/termini/it/index.html if you
can read Italian.

I wonder who is going to become crazy consuming metadata via OAI-PMH as
a totally not-for-profit initiative (other than myself, say). I
forwarded Jonathan's first email to a colleague who's been working on
the OAI stuff for the website, will let you know.

Any news from other countries?

Ciao
steko
-- 
Stefano Costa
Coordinator, Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology
http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/archaeology
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org · http://opendefinition.org/