The Museum APIs page is useful for listing other Museum/Gallery APIs, but an excellent way of demonstrating the power/value of APIs is to highlight non-museum specific APIs that we can use to expedite the development and reduce the complexity of museum projects.
Text Processing and Tagging
| Name/Link | Method | Description |
|---|
| Calais |
REST and SOAP |
"The Calais Web Service allows you to automatically annotate your content with rich semantic metadata, including entities such as people and companies and events and facts such as acquisitions and management changes."
Useful for extracting taxonomic terms (people, places, organisations, events, etc) from text, but works best with larger (multiple paragraph) chunks of text. Requires (free) API key.
|
| Yahoo! Term Extraction |
REST |
"The Term Extraction Web Service provides a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger content"
Similar to Calais, but doesn't use a global/pre-defined taxonomy of terms; instead returns 'non-noise' words from a chunk of text (with estimated 'score/weightings). Unlike Calais, can be used on shorter sections of text. Requires (free) API key.
|
| Amazon Mechanical Turk |
SOAP |
Not exactly a text processing/tagging service, but a service for sending 'manual' jobs to people (a 'distributed taskforce') via an API; often used for tagging images or cleaning/checking text. From the website: "Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their applications." |
Location and Geo
| Name/Link | Method | Description |
|---|
| Yahoo! GeoPlanet |
REST |
Pass in any string of text containing a country, city, town, postal code, area (etc), and the API will return long/lat co-ordinates for the location, as well as the continent/country/city/etc in a pre-defined taxonomy. Requires (free) API key. |
| LinkedGeoData |
REST API, SPARQL endpoint |
LinkedGeoData is an effort to add a spatial dimension to the Web of Data / Semantic Web. LinkedGeoData uses the information collected by the OpenStreetMap project and makes it available as an RDF knowledge base according to the Linked Data principles. It interlinks this data with other knowledge bases in the Linking Open Data initiative. |
Dates and Times
| Name/Link | Method | Description |
|---|
| Date Normaliser |
REST |
Pass in a date or date range (e.g. 1980-03, 17th Century, 200-100 BC), and the API will return a simple XML string that normalises the date into ISO 8601 style. Currently unsophisticated/fairly limited. |
Data Sources
| Name/Link | Method | Description |
|---|
| Freebase |
REST, CSV Data Dump |
A huge resource of many crowd-sourced granular data sets, including artists, places, paintings and historical events. |
| dbPedia |
REST, CSV Data Dump |
All the structured data (e.g. the infoboxes, which include artists, events, places) from Wikipedia. |
Infrastructure
| Name/Link | Method | Description |
|---|
| 3scale |
REST |
Already have a Museum API? 3scale will help you manage, track/monitor and even bill/charge for use of your APIs. |
| Mashery |
? |
Similar to above (3scale). |
| Amazon Web Services |
Various |
Most Amazon Web Services (e.g. EC2 for Hosting/Computing Power, S3 for Storage) can be accessed via an API, allowing you to programmatically create and manage your virtual instances, data, etc. |
| Google Analytics |
REST |
Access and manage your analytics data via an API. |
| Feedburner |
REST |
Manage and track your RSS usage with the Feedburner API. |
Events
[Mia - I've moved this from the 'Other APIs' page so it can be specifically about museum APIs but haven't had time to put them into Dan's schema above. #halfarsedtidyingeffort]
UK Civil Service Job Service API http://beta.civilservice.gov.uk/developers/index.aspx
"...we have developed a Civil Service Job Service API for government departments to use and incorporate onto their own website." The page lists requirements, licensing, methods (with sample output), exception and invalid requests (with examples of error output).
lolcats API
[Yes, really] http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/01/26/api-contest/ "Most people know us as a picture + caption site, but we’re building out a platform that allows anyone to create, vote on and feature mashups of photos and whatever else you can think of."
- Upload new photos for captioning, or mashing up.
- Upload already captioned photos and meta data.
- Authenticate Cheezburger accounts.
- Get a feed of top-rated images.
- Get a feed of uncaptioned images.
- Run caption contests for any particular picture
Open Library API
http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api
"The Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive. Its goal is to create an online catalog that contains one web page for every book ever published. To do this, it accepts data from a variety of sources: libraries, publishers, book-sellers, and individuals."
And there's a sandbox - what an excellent idea.
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