[open-heritage] Fwd: News Release: Open data challenge: what treasures can you find?

[Jonathan Gray]

Just in case anyone hasn't seen this!


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rebecca O'Brien <r.obrien at jisc.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 10:44 AM
Subject: News Release: Open data challenge: what treasures can you find?
To: JISC-ANNOUNCE at jiscmail.ac.uk


News release
19 July 2011

Open data challenge: what treasures can you find?

Libraries, museums and archives have recently taken to experimenting
with open data with a vengeance and now the JISC Discovery programme
http://discovery.ac.uk/ with the DevCSI project
http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/about/ are running an international
competition to see what people can unearth in this data.

The challenge is to develop an application which allows people to
discover the treasures hidden in one of ten datasets - from the
shipwrecks lurking off UK shores, to the metadata behind Jane Austen’s
will online.

The rich data sets on offer are:

library data from the British Library, Cambridge and Lincoln
archives data from the National Archives and the Archives hub
English Heritage places data
circulation data from UK university libraries
museum data from the Tyne and Wear Museums collections
search data from the OpenURL router service
the musicnet codex

Andy MacGregor, JISC programme manager, said: "Libraries, museums and
archives are opening up their data because they recognise the
potential to harvest it in interesting new ways to make their
collections more useful for education and research. Whether this is
through striking visualisations, ways of exploring their content or
valuable juxtapositions with other, similar collections, this
competition is an opportunity to see what exciting possibilities
clever developers can dream up for this rich pot of information."

The judges are interested in browser-based applications that genuinely
make the collections from these libraries and museums even more useful
for people.

There’s a tablet computer – an EEE Pad Transformer - for the overall
winner but also twelve other prizes to be won.

The competition closes on 1 August 2011.

Read the rules of the competition on the Discovery site -
http://discovery.ac.uk/developers/competition/

Be inspired by Alex Parker from the University of Southampton, who won
a previous JISC competition by bringing to life library data with his
Book Galaxy - blue dots are titles and yellow dots are courses
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ajp3g08/mosaicbookgalaxy/

Why not have a go and see what you can do?

Ends



-- 
Jonathan Gray

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

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg