Our thanks to everyone who participated, commented, critiqued or cheered the project along.

As a result, I’ve realised that there may be some mismatch between the way mashups tend to work, and the scope we’ve suggested for entries to our competition. The types of interfaces someone might produce with the API may lend themselves more to exploring one particular idea in depth than produce something suitable for the broadest range of our audiences.

So I’m proposing to change the scope for entries to the competition, to make it more realistic and a better experience for entrants: I’d like to ask you to build a section of a site, rather than a whole site. The scope for entrants would then be: “create something that does one thing, and does it well”. Our criteria – use of collections data, creativity, accessibility, user experience and ease of deployment and maintenance – are still important but we’ll consider them alongside the type of mashup you submit.

This might mean producing a mashup for one particular way of exploring the objects, or exploring a sub-set of the objects. It’d then be up to us to combine the winning mashups into a larger site that works for our audiences.

What do you think? If there aren’t any huge objections, I’ll go ahead and update the criteria. Of course, if you’ve been working on something and feel it’s unfair to change the criteria at this stage, let me know and we’ll work something out.

As a reminder, here are the basic details for the Cosmic Collections competition:

How to take part

1. Check out the data here

2. Get some help:

Read our tips for entrants, check out these mashup resources, and get some info about our audiences. Check out the documentation and connect with other people who want to enter the competiton. You can also join the Google group or use the hashtag #coscultcom in conversations on Twitter.

3. Get inspired

Visit the exhibition and check out these videos about the exhibition

4. Get creative and get mashing!

5. Send us a link to your entry.

Email us by midnight on November 28 (GMT) – you don’t need to pre-register.

(And the title? I’m a big fan of the Unix philosophy, “do one thing and do it well”.)

And speaking of collections online, check out the V&A’s Collections Search, just out in beta today.  There’s so much to explore and the interface is a delight.  Congratulations to all involved!

The launch event will be held at the Science Museum on Saturday, October 24, 2009.  We’re planning a curator’s talk about the Cosmos and Culture exhibition, and we’re looking at ways to help people meet potential team mates – some kind of ‘hack matching’ thing.  We’ve made it a Saturday so that most people should be able to come, and it’ll be open to anyone.  More details to follow as we work them out!

At this stage, the competition submission date will be November 28, 2009, and we’re aiming to have the winning website(s) live to the public by mid-December.

If you’ve got any questions, leave a comment on this post, or tweet with the hash tag #coscultcom.

There’s a list of things you can do if you work in a museum or are a developer interested in using museum data – jump in!

I’m really putting this post here so I’ve got something to point to during any discussions at a conference (Museums and the Web) I’m at next week. It’s not perfectly written, and it doesn’t necessarily totally reflect current thinking – but I guess that’s in the nature of the thing. Perhaps the document is in perpetual beta. So consider this a draft, and remember that it’s a document written for internal consumption, repurposed in two minutes before I go back to debugging some code.

[Update: I've put the presentation I gave internally about this on Slideshare.]

Cosmos Mashup Competition

Objectives

• Make best use of the limited budget and staff time to get the highest impact web presence for Cosmos & Culture
• Experiment with new ways of making objects available via the web
• Experiment with new ways of attracting user-generated content
• Provide our audiences with new visualisations and interpretative contexts for objects

How the competition works
We make raw data about C&C’s objects (name, date, caption text, people, locations, relevant celestial body, associated images etc etc) available.

Users come up with a mashup interface for this. This will integrate our object information with other freely available resources (examples could include Google Maps; sky mapping applications like Google Sky, Stellarium and Celestia; photo-sharing sites; Yahoo Pipe; IBM Many Eyes, astronomy news feeds … or something completely unexpected). The other resources will generally be a form of visualisation (maps, timelines, etc) or another data source.

The best mashup, as judged by a panel (made up of?) is awarded the prize fund. We will be judging in terms of creativity rather than purely technical accomplishment so if someone comes up with a great idea that they can’t quite execute, we can work this up to get it online.

[Working up the final project might take resources so we'd need to think about this - or we could pair them with another contestant.]

If feasible, we could run a ‘mashup speed dating’ ['hack matching'] event as part of the programme (between the data being released and the deadline for submission) – this would allow people to meet and share creative ideas, knowledge and skills. It would be easier to run this as part of Dana/Lates programme but we can look at different ways of doing it.

Audience
At the competition stage the field would be relatively small, as users will need some familiarity with mashups. Possible entrants could include design students, web designers, astronomers (many are very web literate) etc. Although a small field it enables us to target some sectors who might not normally be interested in a Science Museum web offer, and can be open to people around the world.

Once the finished web presence goes live it is open to all of our web audience.

Timescales
To avoid confusion with everything else going on at the Science Museum in 2009, we could open the competition in Autumn 2009 (there are various astronomy anniversaries we could tie into).

Period between the data release (or event) and the submission date should not be more than a month or it will lose momentum.

Possible benefits
We get users to develop a significant web presence for the exhibition – we don’t have time or budget to do this ourselves.
Fits aim of trying out new ways of interpreting objects.
We could get something really innovative.
The interface could have a life beyond the exhibition run and could be extended to the wider collection (or even to collaborations with other institutions if they are interested).
Shows we are serious about making the collection more accessible, and encouraging users to find their own stories about objects.
Makes use of raw information we are already generating for objects, so does not generate extra load on content team.

Feel free to comment! We’re still working out the competition parameters, judging, etc.

If you’ve got data that might work well with our collections data, I’d love to hear from you.

If you’re interested in the API side of things, you can join in on the museum API wiki.

What you can do:

• Upload or copy and paste some examples from your collections data schemas – whether that’s nicely marked up xml, a table structure from the databases that feed your website, even plain old HTML from an online page.
• Link to your API, tell us what’s worked, which ideas we should pinch
• List the functionality of your API (through documentation, examples, whatever)
• Talk about how you decided how to implement your API
• Start a discusion with your questions, unresolved issues

The error on your site may be something like:

Configuration Error
Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: There is no Unicode byte order mark. Cannot switch to Unicode.

Source Error:

[No relevant source lines]

To fix this, open the web.config in Notepad, choose ‘Save As’ from the File menu. In the ‘Save As’ dialogue box, make sure the filename is web.config, ’save as type’ is ‘All files’ and Encoding is ‘Unicode’.

There are probably other ways of fixing the error, but this is the ‘lowest common denominator’ fix, and if you’re racing to get a live server back up, Notepad might be all you have.

I should point out that I didn’t discover this by bringing the live web server down, so if you work for the Science Museum, don’t panic!

Don’t we need a standard for what a museum API looks like, and what it delivers? Even better, shouldn’t we stop thinking that we need to invent everything we use, and just adopt something like the Linked Data paradigm?

I quickly checked with Daniel, our head of web, that it was ok for me to throw this open to the world, and posted in response:

Science Museum is looking at releasing an API soon – project-specific to start with, but with the intention of using that as an iterative testing and learning process, and I’d be happy to talk to other museums about what they’re doing to try and come up with something with at least some core similarities in the schema and functionality. Anyone up for it?

So, are you up for it? I’ve had a few good responses already. My vague idea is maybe using digitalheritage.ning.com to share data schemas, API functionality, discuss the various acronyms we’re using, etc.

You can leave a comment here, or join the ning, or @miaridge on twitter.