Knowledge Integration is delighted to announce the launch of the Museum Data Service (MDS) built on our open-source CIIM platform.
‘Museums are changing,’ said Sir Chris Bryant MP, Minister of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport at the launch. ‘They have always showcased the stories of how we came to be who we are today. But the Museum Data Service is another leap forward in museums’ digital capabilities, expanding opportunities for research and collaboration, and preserving the rich history that our museums hold.’
This groundbreaking service aims to bring together all of the data from all UK Museums, large and small.
A collaboration between Art UK , Collections Trust and Leicester University Institute for Digital Culture and funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the MDS takes the innovative approach of accepting museum data in whatever form it can be supplied by the contributing organisations.
Previous (and many existing) services place the burden of data conformance on the supplying institutions, which inevitably tilts supply in favour of museums who have the resources to fulfil this requirement. This also creates a barrier for all institutions in a climate when they are already expected to do more with less resources.
The team at Knowledge Integration have designed a groundbreaking approach to data ingest, using configuration over code, to produce an ELT ingest pipeline into our CIIM middleware.
Using the Spectrum collections management standard as a common vocabulary, the pipeline was iteratively refined and enhanced, working in collaboration with the teams at Art UK and Collections Trust. The result is an easy to use solution in which detailed analysis and visualisation of the incoming data is used to simplify the transformation process.
The analysis is also used to create the legal framework under which the data can be shared by the institutions’, both by setting the licensing terms and also allowing the separation of fields within the supplied data into different audience-specific privacy levels (e.g. public, researchers, internal administrators).
A configurable syndication API framework has also been created for B2B data sharing. This provides token-based access to the MDS data, and allows the MDS data set to be partitioned within a particular token, to only deliver those resources which are of interest to the specific data consumer. The ‘same’ tokens can also be used by consuming systems to poll for new/updated data which has been added to the MDS and also matches their interest profile.
The project has been a huge focus for the CIIM team over the last 18 months and everyone has contributed greatly, but special mention must go to Luke Heyfron and Mark Johnson (technical/UI leads), who have managed to turn an abstract, extremely complex technical problem into a configurable, easy to use visual solution, and that is an enormous achievement for the team generally and them specifically.
The official launch was held at Bloomberg offices in London on Thursday 12th September and K Int were represented by Rob Tice, Mark Johnson and Luke Heyfron from the CIIM team.