As part of the current job, I’ve been looking closely at SOAP and getting PHP to connect to endpoints written in other languages by other people. In my last job, I used SOAP to set up services to be contacted by external suppliers and created the server. One of the challenges that I faced in …
The funding pit and the pendulum – arts and heritage funding report released
The Culture, Media and Sports committee have released a report on funding of arts and heritage which is fairly damning. It opens: Arts and heritage in Britain are among our greatest assets. They bring great cultural and economic benefits and everybody should have access to them. The report calls for the Arts Council for England …
The orphans are not being exploited
It appears that a court might be able to see some sense and stop Google digitising orphan works, according to a judgement today (source: Wired ). A US federal judge commented that whilst the agreement is good, it went to far. The original agreement appears to have given Google the right to digitise and sell …
Marking up Open Correspondence with TEI XML
As part of the next version of Open Correspondence, I’ve been working on the XML and JSON mark-up. As part of the XML, I’ve been using the TEI mark-up for the letters. I once hard this described as “XML for people who don’t think XML is flexible enough”. Now I can see why. It is …
Finding and mapping influences
The awesome Jonathan Gray posted an intriguing question on his blog about mapping influence in intellectual history. What he is trying to do is to map the possible routes of influence between people. In his case, it is philosophers; in mine, authors. One of the driving ideas behind the Open Correspondence RDF was to begin …
Adding linguistic interfaces to Open Correspondence
I’ve been playing around with the Python NLTK package, in particular the WordNet interface. WordNet is hosted by Princeton University. I mentioned that I was going to look at this and the idea of allow a search for lemmas of a word. It came about from a question posed on Open Literature mailing list regarding …
Weeknotes: Open Correspondence updates
I’ve bitten the bullet and done it. I’ve uploaded the current changes to the Open Correspondence site. The current changes are: additional fields in the RDF endpoint. I still need to do some major work to JSON and XML which I hope to do for the next update. a basic text search a basic set …
Weeknotes: Conferences and Open Correspondence
On Wednesday I went to the JISC dev8d conference. I wish I could have gone for both days but time doesn’t permit at the moment. In all, I had a trhough provoking day and managed to catch talks on the Mobile Web (which I wasn’t expecting) and Linked Data. Whilst I didn’t attend the programming …
Weeknotes: Places in Open Correspondence
I’ve been doing some work to Open Correspondence over the last couple of weeks. I started re-parsing the letters to expose some more metadata, mainly placenames and to normalise them. I’ve finally done the first pass of this update which I’m hoping to make live soon once I’ve updated the controllers and re-checked the other …
Exposing the Classic Serial data
I’ve just been listening to the serialisation of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone on Radio Four in its Classic serial slot. Whilst listening (and remembering how much I had enjoyed it when I read it years ago), I began thinking about trying to expose it as Linked Data so that the book’s publication detail could be …