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

Sun Nov 21 18:32:56 UTC 2010

Heya Stefano,

Cheers for this, it's really interesting to get a view on the italian
perspective!

One of the things I'm interested in is not throwing the baby out with
the bath-water (As it were). I think both the cultural and bib domains
have a long and proud history of sharing data in a time that pre-dates
many of our newer licences. Mostly, I think thats because these
domains operate at a level of implicit trust and openness that negate
the need for licenses in the normal day to day activities of cultural
institutions. In many cases, I think the cultural institutions just
see the extra licensing issues as a headache that simply doesn't need
to be solved for the domain. I'm not sure thats an accurate
perspective, but it's one we need to develop good answers for.

When you say CulturaItalia is a mess, is that primarily from a
licensing perspective? Is there anything we can do to improve the
situation? I can't really see why any institution would want to
enforce strict copyright on curatorial records (Anyone out there have
an opinion on this.. I'm sure I'm wrong about it, I just cant see
why).

Cheers,
e

On 20 November 2010 19:49, Stefano Costa <stefano.costa at okfn.org> wrote:
> 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/
>
>
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-- 
Ian Ibbotson
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