Implementing a LOD service by proxying an institution's Web API (blog post)

[Conal Tuohy]

A lot of larger GLAMs have web APIs that expose their collections in open but non-standard ways. This blog post describes a lightweight and flexible mechanism to extend such APIs to conform to Linked Data principles. The example makes use of a transforming proxy to expose the JSON-based API of Museum Victoria as Linked Open Data using the CIDOC-CRM ontology.

http://conaltuohy.com/blog/lod-from-custom-web-api/

[Conal Tuohy]

This last blog post in the series describes the data modelling challenges of converting a museum's web API into a LOD service.

http://conaltuohy.com/blog/bridging-conceptual-gap-api-cidoc-crm/

The collection API is "record-oriented", and many of the records' fields are simply, without unique identifiers; this blog posts shows how to map that kind of API to RDF and produce a LOD service that queries the API "on the fly" to generate LOD on request.

The specific example in the blog post is a Museum, and the ontology used is the CIDOC CRM museum ontology, but there are some quite general issues that would apply equaly to other types of institutions and other APIs.

Conal