Data Unbound

The new About CC0 — “No Rights Reserved” Creative Commons license has been released as 1.0. This new license gives “creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law.” Great. Wondering when it’ll be available for regular users to associate with their own photos on Flickr — as ooposed to the public domain assertion licensing provision already in use in the Flickr Commons.

I’ve been thinking about how to prepare for  tomorrow’s Build-A-Base tutorial at Freebase. I’ve already started building two bases:

• PolDB prototype — a prototype of an IMDB for American politicians
• Semantic History of Art Prototypes — something I want to develop into a NEH grant proposal

For the PolDB project, I should sit down to make a schema to model American politicians, first by identifying relevant ones already in Freebase and then finding one or two that are not currently in Freebase or are woefully inadequate.    Tomorrow, I want  to hear any war stories around using Freebase WEX, crawling government databases, pushing public domain info into Freebase by users.

On the data modeling front, I’d like to learn techniques for evolving schemas and how to involve the Freebase community in helping out.   Perhaps data models for legislators might be a well understood topic; I should  ask on the openhouse list,  I should also ask about the state level and postpone municipal to the future.

On the History of Art front, I’m interested in building some sort of history of art tools and/or  website aimed at improving art history learning and teaching — both in the classroom and in informal settings.  I’m currently crafting a proposal for the NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up program , which is due on Tuesday, April 8.  My ideas are still forming but I’d like to build a “semantic” open history of arts database useful for learning/teaching the history of art — using Freebase.

I know that there’s a good start in Freebase Visual Arts Commons. My working assumption is that I can build on top of that — meaning that

1. the visual arts commons (actually, what’s the difference between a “commons” and a “base” — is a commons an officially sanctioned base?) is the place to start from and contribute to
2. that the commons is a pretty good corpus — something I have to check.  That is, is it comprehensive enough for people to start to ask meaningful questions and get reasonable answers using the data already there + maybe a bit of supplementary data entry work.

With those assumptions in mind,   I’d like to

1. work with people who have relevant data to try to convince them to give some of it to Freebase. That might take some doing, but perhaps some museums would be willing to contribute a subset of data once they see some benefits
2. build services and tools to help in the learning and teaching aspects of the history of art

Some possible ideas:

• tools to help people review facts in the history of arts — maybe a slide reviewer / guessing game
• tools to let art history instructors integrate timelines, little JavaScript widgets representing art works, artists, periods in the context of their own websites.

I’m trying to garner support for this project in the Freebase and art history community.

One paragraph from Congress Jumps on the Web 2.0 Bandwagon | Radical Tech | Fast Company caught my eye:

Latta agrees and adds “Real time communication applications, like Twitter and Facebook, provide Members of Congress an ability to receive feedback from their constituents even as the debate is taking place on the floor of the House.”

Hmmm…I wonder whether Barbara Lee, of California’s 9th congressional district), or the two California senators (Barbara Boxer, or Dianne Feinstein) communicate with constituents with Twitter or Facebook. Tweet Congress shows that Boxer does but not Feinstein or Lee. So if I direct messaged @Barbara_Boxer, will that mean anything? If I see something going down on C-Span, should I hop on to Twitter or pick up the phone, run to my fax machine, write letters — or all of the above?