With the help of Professor Beat Estermann, Culture Creates formed a team from both Canada and Switzerland to participate in GLAMhack 2021, the Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon. As the Deputy Head of the Institute for Public Sector Transformation and Head of the “Data & Infrastructure” Unit at Berne University of Applied Sciences, Esterman brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to international projects that promote linked open data.
This is the second year in a row that we’ve participated in the hackathon. GLAMhack 2021 gave us an opportunity to continue working on Culture inTime – a prototype based on federated data that was first developed during GLAMhack 2020.
In 2020, the Culture InTime hackathon team prototyped the first version of a friendly calendar-like interface of contemporary and historical performing arts production information. This information came from 2 sources:
- Swiss Archive for the Performing Arts (SAPA), a knowledge graph of the Schauspielhaus Zürich between 1969 – 2019 uploaded to Wikidata
- Artsdata.ca, a knowledge graph of current performing arts events happening in Canada.
Users of Culture inTime version 1 could search for productions or browse ‘Spotlights’ that focus on a particular set of parameters such as a location or time period.
This year, some key new features were developed to open up the application for wider use:
- A new interface was built to allow anyone with the right technical skills to add new data sources
- Anyone can now configure Spotlights of performing arts production data that is available in Culture inTime. These spotlight are publicly shared on the platform for anyone to browse.
The application continues to put its focus on Performing Arts Productions. Go to https://culture-intime.herokuapp.com/ to try it out!