vendredi 21 septembre 2007

What is Open Melodie ?

Maybe my first post on this blog should explain that !
Open Melodie is the name I gave to an effort to bring the software I used in the Musée Achéménide for the open source community. And hopefully, it will also be the name of this software, in its open source form.
The Musée Achéménide in a nutshell, for those who dont know what it is (I guess there are many !), is an epic effort to bring online all the artefacts from the Aechemenid period, online, with scientific documentation and high resolution photos when they are available.
And when I say "high resolution", it's really "high". In fact, some of the images are about 500M pixels in size, which is really huge. I'm not sure we can find such images anywhere else on the Internet.
If you want to learn more about this museum, you can :
- download a presentation of the project in PDF in french and in english.
The Open Melodie project will be divided in several modules. The first to be released will be Melodie-images, the Java API that makes possible the access to the highres images. This is the easy part. We are very close (I guess a few weeks) to this realease.
Then Melodie-data will be released after that. This will be harder, because the way the data is handled in the base is very special, due to the origin of the data. I'll make another post to describe that in more details. It will also incur a major rewrite of the code, which is based on old and obsolete APIs, like EA versions of JAXB, totally uncompatible with the one we have now, etc...
Any kinds of comments, thoughts, advice, concerns, feedback of any sort, about this project and these APIs will of course be most welcomed !