This is a talk I have given at a few places like Open Australia HackFest which introduces hackers to the public download of the Museum's collection data we made available for mash-ups and the like via Creative Commons....

1. Using the
Powerhouse Museum
Collection Data
Luke Dearnley
v2.0

2. Hello
• I am Luke Dearnley
• I work at
www.powerhousemuseum.com

3. as a
NERD!
(i.e. developer)

4. Why am I here?
• To give you our data! (We are a data
provider)
• We offer one of few ‘cultural’
datasets
• And to explain what is in it
• And suggest how you might use it

5. What is our data
about?
• To answer that we need to ask
‘What do museums do?’
• Collect (significant) objects
• Research them (and much more)

6. What do WE do?
• Unique and diverse collection
spanning:
• history, science, technology, design
• industry, decorative arts, music
• transport and space exploration

7. Other stuff

8. So, we are
different...
• We don’t have dinosaur skeletons
• or animal/insect specimens etc
• i.e. no natural sciences collection
• so... what DO we have??

14. How does this help
you?
• rich, well described collection
• but, only ever 5% on display
• so we decided to put it ONLINE
• this means all the data is in a
DIGITAL form

15. Collection - Online
• online: we have much more ‘on
display’
• generally the uncatalogued not on
display
• www.powerhousemuseum.com/
collection/database/
• it looks like this....

17. Download metadata
• We have made the metadata
available for all online objects
• over 73,500 objects
• 9MB zip file
• expands to a 50+MB text file

18. Data Format
• tab separated text file
• LONG file. Avoid Excel.
• l33t text editors will cope :)
• some fields have multiple values
separated by the char | (pipe)

19. • All the metadata is licensed under
Creative Commons CC-BY-SA
• free to use, remix, play with data
• provided you don’t lock it up
• and you must attribute us!

20. What is in there?
• unique identifier
• a persistent URL
• name of object
• blob of descriptive text
• dimensions (where measured)
• dates associated with object
• who designed, made or used object
• places it was made, designed, used

21. You will notice...
• Not every object has every field
• Objects updated as we do research
• Most improvements occur when objects
come out on display
• Objects acquired most recently have
richest metadata
• They typically have rego numbers
starting with 2000 and something...

22. Lets have a look at
it

24. What to do...?
• make maps by reverse geocoding
our locations
• make timelines using our date fields
• connect the people and companies
mentioned in the records with
biographical and company records
held elsewhere

25. Or...
• mine the descriptive text for more
dates, names, places
• make a semantic repository of the
content with its own API
• you will think of more - those are
just some of the things we have
been experimenting with ourselves

26. Phm on Flickr
• Note that we have a public domain
photo collection on Flickr
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/
powerhouse_museum/
• about 50% are quite precisely geocoded
• people have made Google StreetView
mash-ups and Augmented Reality
prototypes with them so far

28. What can you do?
• We’d love to see what you can do!

29. Where is the data?
• Oh yes....
• www.powerhousemuseum.com/
collection/database/download.php

30. Contacting me
• email: luked@phm.gov.au
• twitter: @LukeSnarl
• that data location again?
• www.powerhousemuseum.com/
collection/database/download.php