M+Export

We talked about the decider today. The decider is supposed to select the media resources which shall be published. We agreed to use only one algorithm. By this I mean a relatively complex decision process and NOT a simple mapping rule, as for example:

if string "alpha" in field a then publish this resource to alpha.

This is the second part of my blog on exporting MuseumPlus (M+) to xml. I write this part for Frank. In this part, I describe how you get simple XML out of the RTF which produced in the first part. I had written perl, batch and xslt years ago and I was really curious if it still works, -- and yes it does! The outcome of this step is nice xml in a structure which obviously mimicks the "internal" structure of the database.

Why and what for?

This is a description how to get XML data out of MuseumPlus (M+). I write this for Rainer and his current project. The idea is to see how this export can be optimized, and how much can be done by others.  Originally, I have written this export for ethnoArc. This page describes the first part of the process which could easily be done by someone else.

Technical overview and justification

In the ethnoArc project, I created a way to export data from MuseumPlus, a proprietary museum documentation system, to xml data. The idea was not to access data in any way illeagally, so that I use clumsy report function.  As a result, the export is rather tedious and error prone, but it works. I use a combination of perl, batch, xslt scripts which I explain in this series of postings.

My notes on converting MPX to Museumdat.

• Use mpx2mdat....xsl to transform mpx.lvl3 to museumdat
• cpMdatResources.pl seems to be the version I used in the museum. It changes the path and copies the images.
  TODO:I should include the creation of thumbs and their corresponding listing in the museumdat-xml file.

For more info on museumdat see www.museumdat.org

For the ethnoArc project I created an XML export from the museum's database MuseumPlus by Zetcom (http://www.zetcom.ch/).

This format mimicks the internal structure. I will upload the current XSD to this blog.

It basically looks like this