Frankie Roberto has made a web app based on the object records from the collections of the Science Museum, the National Media Museum and the National Railway Museum released yesterday. In his words:
I thought I’d have a quick play with the data last night, and so managed to import them into a database and built a quick web app called ‘Things’:
http://what-is-this.heroku.com/The main thing I wanted out of the data was to be able to browse by type-of-thing (eg ‘steam engines’). Given that this information isn’t easily accessible from the existing data, the first thing that ‘Things’ does is ask people to help classify the objects.
It’s sort of like tagging. But easier. :-)
If I get enough things classified I may have a go at seeing if an algorithm can learn from the data and classify the rest.
Let me know what you think.
Source code is here: https://github.com/frankieroberto/things - patches welcome!
Given the number of crowdsourcing projects around*, the next step for the museum may be working out how to manage and make the most of user-created data we get back from projects like this. This would be an excellent problem to have.
* I’ve also got lots of data to handover based on tags and facts added by people playing with the astronomy collections on Museum Metadata Games, which was again only possible because the Powerhouse Museum has an API and the Science Museum made an earlier, XML-based API.
