Projekt:Öppen databas för offentlig konst 2013/Ansökan till Open Humanities Award

Ansökan har avslagits. Motivering: 2013-04-23

Ansökan

Organisation: The Open Humanities Awards

Sista ansökningsdatum: 13 mars

Max bidrag: 3 000-5 000 euro (3-5 vinnare delar på 15 000 euro)

Bedömd chans: 10%

Väntevärde: ~4 000 kr

Värde för WMSE (1-5):

Beslutsdatum: 2013-04-23

Uppföljning inför inskick:

Name
Wikimedia Sweden (André Costa)

Affiliation (e.g. university, school, company)
Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization.

Email address
andre.costawikimedia.se

Telephone number

Country of residence
Sweden

How would your project help to further humanities research? (e.g. it will make more content and data openly available for researchers to use, it will produce novel insights into humanities data through visualisations...)

Our project aims to create an open database of all public art in Sweden. No such database exists today as this information is held by each municipality. By bringing all of this information together into one free and open database, with an open API, it is our hope that researchers will both be able to get an overview of the area as well as one standardised resource to work with.

Whereas museum collections characteristically have extensive metadata and is often accessible online, through e.g. Europeana, the public art collections are rarely made available and many times have incomplete metadata. For this reason we are also intending to integrate the database with Wikipedia (initially the Swedish language version) so that user generated content can be gathered and integrated with the database. This may include geotagging or adding freely licensed images (on Wikimedia Commons). An effort will also be made to tie objects and artists to Wikidata entities to facilitate future integration with other sources of open cultural data. The UGC material will be clearly marked so that researchers know which information has come straight from the municipalities.

Since this is the first time a structured effort of collecting datasets from municipalities all over Sweden has been done we also view this as an opportunity to inform the municipalities about the value of open and structured data. We have already seen how our interaction has led to internal discussions within some municipalities and it is our hope that our project will thus facilitating future open data projects.

Part of our project is also to engage the many Wikimedia volunteer developers in Sweden, and globally, and with their help create tools that will help both to visualize the data and use it in new and different ways. We are also looking for ways of cross pollinating the our database with other open databases.

Which aspects of your project will utilise open content, open data and/or open source tools and how will they be used?
The core contents of the database will be made up by official information which, under Swedish law, is free to use and reuse without constraints. This data will be made available to us through a combination of freedom of information requests and voluntary collaboration with the municipalities and other actors with public art collections in Sweden, such as the counties and the Swedish Arts Council.

The database will be free to use and available under an open license: cc-by-sa-3.0 for content (to be compatible with Wikipedia) and ODbL for the database itself.

The database will (primarily) be accessible through an open and free to use API thus allowing any interested party to build on the available resources. The API itself will also be open source.

List any open content, open data and/or open source tools you plan to use

• Wikimedia Commons - image repository.
• Wikipedia - as a source of UGC material and secondary interface to the database.
• Open Street Map - geographical visualisation.
• MySQL - database coding.
• PHP - api coding.
• Python - coding for interaction with Wikipedia.

How would you use the prize money to support your project?
The prize money would allow us to expand the project beyond the current goal of 25 datasets. The more municipalities and other entities we are able to include the more the database increases in value for humanities research and for our free educational projects. Having a more complete database would also increase our chances of getting further funding later on, thus allowing us to keep the database up to date and hosted on our servers.

During the prolonged project time we will also have the opportunity to initiate more co-operations, get more actors to start thinking about the value of open data and find new innovative ways of integrating other resources and databases with our own.