prometheus is a distributed digital image archive that currently makes more than 3,496,000 images of over 120 databases from institutes, research facilities and museums researchable on a common user interface.
Situated at the Institute of Art History of the University of Cologne, prometheus is supported by the non-profit association prometheus e.V. which promotes the ongoing developments of the digital media for science and research.
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Programming interfaces – APIs – facilitate the transfer of data between systems. They are used in programming to create software or interact with an external system. Via API, developers have access to standard commands for executing general operations so that code does not have to be rewritten. Also prometheus offers an API, which enables communication with pandora, the software from prometheus, for your own new applications. The following actions are available
(1) Submit search queries,
(2) retrieve images and
(3) retrieve image collections.
Detailed information can be found under Documentation
Various museums also offer interfaces that make it possible to integrate their online collections directly into prometheus, for example the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. So far, we have integrated seven image databases via API: Amsterdam Museum, Getty Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paris Musees, Rijksmuseum Collection, Statens Museum for Kunst and The Cleveland Museum of Art.
The Art Institute of Chicago also offers its public data via a centralized, searchable API. To show what is possible with their interface, they also provide a script that can be used to query the API for public domain artworks, which are then displayed with letters, numbers and special characters, as ASCII-Art.
