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Web person at the Imperial War Museum, just completed PhD about digital sustainability in museums (the original motivation for this blog was as my research diary). Posting occasionally, and usually museum tech stuff but prone to stray. I welcome comments if you want to take anything further. These are my opinions and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else (unless they thought of them too). Twitter: @jottevanger

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

links wot caught my eye lately. Number 1 in a series of n>=1

Managing the Flow - the Social Data Flow
RWW on Alfreso's approach to managing the gushing torrent of social data. "Content is the conversation".
"Alfresco's push is also part of its strategic adoption of CMIS, an open standard for integrating content into enterprise environments. This allows Alfresco to integrate with IBM's Lotus Quickr and Drupal as two examples."

oEmbed
I've not really registered this one before. A standard to enable systems to work out how to address a request for information about image and video resources so that they can be embedded elsewhere. Or something. Thinking, this does something significantly different to MediaRSS that could be useful for us in opening up our content for reuse. Shame there's nothing for audio in it, the reason seems to be for culpably UI-related reasons. Where's the separation of data from presentation? But otherwise, interesting

Geni - introduction for developers
Geni is a freemium family-tree building web app which aims to "build the world's family tree" or some such. Of course, this is somewhat stymied by the fact that users' trees can, quite rightly, be kept private. But nevertheless the tools are there for linking them together. The existence of an API makes it particularly interesting, even if coverage is poor at present. I guess one could just use it to explore the data you have put in yourself.

How to licence research data - DCC
Clearly this isn't the same problem as how to licence museum collection metadata but it's in the same problem space. It's an issue that few people have really tackled properly yet, at least not in its full implications - it's easy enough to tack a CC-BY licence to something in theory, but how does an organisation really find the right balance between enabling/encouraging reuse, and ensuring that the data are kept up to date, accurate, and (possibly) attributed when no longer on their own digital properties? I don't know the answer, but whilst we're waiting for the issues to be discussed properly this sort of white paper may be the best proxy to get us thinking along the right lines. I think at least there are some instructive analogies to be found here, as well as some stuff that helped clarify legal areas I was confused about.

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