From SDI to ecosystem
Comments(6) Leif has a thought-provoking post up that raises the idea of an ecosystem approach to data-dissemination. In other words, that we should be building a communities of standards-compliant data-providers who can all share each other’s data. Both the new Heritage Gateway, and Swish (representing Scotland and Wales) are planning to allow dissemination of data via web-services at some point, depending on the setup of the individual councils that are providing the data.
Leif says he’ll buy a pint for the first council who allow access to their data in this way- but I think he’s trying to bribe the wrong people really… what about the makers of the software that the council are using? Large numbers of councils are using HBSMR from Exegesis and GGP- when are they planning to provide web-services as part of their software packages?
I understod from Crispin that HBSMR already provides this functionality – but perhaps I shld leave it to him to comment on that
That’s good to hear. In my defence I did take a look on the exegesis site and didn’t see anything about web services… I’d be very interested to see what they provide (so I can persuade my local council that it is possible!)
Hi Jo
Stumbled on your site by accident, and thought I should chip in as suggested by Leif… yes, HBSMR can publish data as a web service, using an add-on called the “HBSMR Gateway”. I imagine Leif has parted with his pint by now, as several HBSMR HERs are now searchable through the Heritage Gateway, and many more are in progress.
Who is your local council? Please feel free to point them in our direction if they do not already use HBSMR!!
At the moment none of the web services is open for direct use outside the Heritage Gateway, though that is technically possible.
In future please do get in touch directly if you want to find out about what our products can and cannot do, or if you have ideas about what they could or should do. Your thoughts always welcome!
Hi Crispin,
Thanks for popping by! The Heritage Gateway is a great resource now (and I’ll be making sure my colleagues know about it), but (and I might be wrong here), I couldn’t see a way of downloading the results of a search as a spatial dataset. For large-scale GIS-based projects, either that kind of access or a web service would be great, and would make our projects much more efficient.
Cheers
Jo
(Have tried to submit this a couple of times… not working…grr try again…)
Why not get in touch with the maintainers of the HBSMR HERs that are already hooked up to the Heritage Gateway and see what they would feel about giving you access directly to the HBSMR Gateway web services (which, by the way, return MIDAS-XML)? There are all kinds of issues here! Cambridgeshire (Sarah Poppy) might be a good place to start. We are currently licensing the HBSMR Gateway per connecting client i.p., so there is a (minor) cost implication, but we’d be happy to waive that for testing purposes. But the big issue is whether LA HERs would be happy to grant this kind of access, and/or what forms of licensing they would wish to put in place.
Thinking longer term (if LAs agree), perhaps it would be more useful if we provided an aggregating service, so that contractors etc did not have to query each HER individually. This is not currently in the plans for the Heritage Gateway, but we could do it. Thoughts?
Crispin
Hi Crispin,
Personally I think the best approach would be to aggregate the data from the Heritage Gateway rather than on a county basis. I can see this being more acceptable to the HERs as they wouldn’t have to worry about that side of things, and to be honest from a bulk-user’s perspective we don’t really mind which county we’re in (and we often have sites – like pipelines, that cross many counties)! I’d be interested to know what sort of arguments could be made against that sort of access too!
Cheers
Jo