The Guardian continues to demonstrate that openness and innovation are its strong suits; and if you happen to be The Guardian and the content that you can provide open access to includes 10 years of broadsheet quality journalism from guardian.co.uk then people take notice.
This is the context within which The Guardian has launched what it is calling Open Platform: a set of content APIs and a collection of datasets that will provide developers of 3rd party applications with access to Guardian content, which includes ‘full fat’ feeds: the full text of articles including content types such as video, audio and photo galleries. In total some 1 million pieces of content published on guardian.co.uk from 1999-2008.
The Guardian has already shared little secrets that provide us with an insight into novel ways to access and explore its content. My favourite is the seemingly unique way that you can combine tags and keywords to create your own virtual page, and the wistful way that The Guardian’s Sean Clarke introduced us to this concept in his Inside guardian.co.uk blog post from last year. What we see exposed in features like this is an insight into the innovations around the use of tags and tag pages that make the site able do things in response to the “what-if we had a tag page that did…” type of request that creative writers and designers at The Guardian come up with every day. Requests that have been fulfilled because The Guardian had the backing and vision to acquire and nurture the in-house capabilities and experience to deliver them.
Innovations, like Open Platform, are made possible by a series of incremental changes to the inner workings of the content management system that, had they been thought of sooner, might have so heavily weighed down the early design as to have anchored the project firmly to the launch pad. Luckily for us the approach has been far more agile and successful than perhaps some dared to hope and the result is far more munificent and adaptable. It demonstrates the commitment that The Guardian is willing, and prepared, to make; not only to the technology, but also to the philosophy, of the web.