Museums and the Web, Linked Open Data, and Drupal

Next week, my colleague David Henry and I will be leading a session at the Museums and the Web 2013 Conference, explaining how we are implementing our Linked Open Data (LOD) architecture at the Missouri History Museum. In short, our session will explain how we are making the data from our rich and diverse collection of objects, photographs, and other resources available in a way that will endure the constant change of modern technology. While the main focus of this session will be the LOD aspects of our architecture, I plan to briefly touch on the important role that Drupal plays in our setup.

How we're using Drupal

Unfortunately, I won't be able to cover much in our thirty minute session, but here's a summary of some of the cool ways we've been able to use Drupal in our approach:

Providing a REST server, using the Services module for integrating local management systems
Rendering requests for a resource according to the requested format (ie XML, JSON, HTML, etc)
Integrating with the IIPImage Image Server to dynamically generate derivatives of our digital assets
Creating mapping classes that map data from various sources to common data
Providing hooks for our custom modules to respond to creation or updating of resources (ie Storing data as RDF, indexing in Apache Solr for fast, faceted searching, etc)

Those are just some of the things we've been able to accomplish using Drupal. What's great is that Drupal has provided us a way to abstract the tools that we use to create our system so that if one or more pieces ever needs to be replaced, we could do so without re-factoring the entire system. In fact, should we ever want to replace Drupal itself, we could also do so without bringing the entire house down. For example, while Drupal is cognizant of our resources, we don't store them as nodes in Drupal. It's this level abstraction that allows us to continue "serving tea on the rapids" and not lose our minds in the process.

More to come

As of this writing, we're roughly 75% done with our implementation and as busy as ever. However, I do plan to share more details on what we've done in the near future. We're also thinking of how we can contribute our work back to the community so that other institutions can benefit from what we've been able to accomplish.

In the mean time, I'd love to discuss more of what we've done with anyone who will be in attendance at the MW2013 conference. Feel free to shoot me an email, or stop by after our session if you'd like to chat.

Until next time!