Science Museum Cosmic Collections competition

The Science Museum have launched their Cosmic Collections website competition. They are offering two £1,000 prizes for web mashups built using their data describing the objects in the Cosmos & Culture gallery. The deadline for entries is 28th November 2009. Full details are available on the competition web page. There’s also a Yahoo! Developer Network interview with Mia Ridge about the competition.

The data has been released using a fairly simple API, so I’ve drafted a YQL open table definition for it. You can use it to retrieve the full dataset:

use "http://eatyourgreens.org.uk/yql/nmsi.cosmosculture.xml";
select * from nmsi.cosmosculture

Try it

or retrieve an individual item, given the accession number:

use "http://eatyourgreens.org.uk/yql/nmsi.cosmosculture.xml";
select * from nmsi.cosmosculture where AccessionNumber = '1923-668';

Try it

You can also use YQL’s own filtering operators to restrict the result set. For example, get items for a particular place:

use "http://eatyourgreens.org.uk/yql/nmsi.cosmosculture.xml";
select * from nmsi.cosmosculture
where LinkedPlaces.Place.PlaceName like '%Italy%'

Try it

The competition wiki has a page describing the catalogue fields returned by the API.