The Omeka team recently announced the release of Omeka 2.1. Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. The focus of this new version of Omeka is interoperability with other systems by including an API for reading and writing information in your Omeka installation.
According to Patrick Murray-John, Omeka Development Team Manager:
Some online collections of cultural heritage material are available with APIs, such as through the Digital Public Library of America and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, to name a few. Version 2.1 lets you join the crowd!
Site administrators can create API keys for any user, giving that user the ability to interact with the Omeka installation by way of third-party client applications. For example, a developer could create an application that connects to another system, such as Fedora or Flickr, and by using that API key, add content directly to an Omeka site.
Similarly, data can travel in the opposite direction, allowing content created in Omeka to be queried and manipulated in whatever ways other systems allow.
To make use of the new API, starter clients have been created to allow developers to get started in JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, and Python.
Some of the other changes and enhancements found in Omeka 2.1 include:
- The ExhibitBuilder and SimplePages plugins have also been updated to work with the API.
- Updates to all of the core themes. These theme upgrades are compatible with Omeka 2.0.
- Keyword search for users
- Added methods for on-the-fly changes to storage adapters
- Show tags for non-Item records in tags browse
- View object now automatically available for background processes
Additional changes found in Omeka 2.1 can be found in the release notes at Omeka.org.