This is SOCH

NOTE! These pages and the demos show what you can do with SOCH and are meant for specialists who develop applications for different user groups.

SOCH (Swedish Open Cultural Heritage) is a web service used to search and fetch data from any organization that holds information or pictures related to the Swedish cultural heritage. The Swedish term for SOCH is "K-samsök", which would be spelled out as "cultural collective search".

SOCH functions as an exchange where data from many local databases are made searchable and visible to the public and to the research community. Being a web service, it is up to application developers to build the actual applications that exploit SOCH. One of the first applications built on SOCH was a mobile phone application showing ancient monuments on a map layer. A number of museums are also building applications on SOCH in order to make more than their own stuff available online.

The beta version was released in February 2009 and by then there were already 1.78 million objects available through SOCH. The number is growing as more content providers hook up, and below you can see the actual number of objects available through SOCH today. The set of objects include archaeological, ethnologic and religious objects, as well as ancient monuments, historical buildings and places, and natural objects.

Aside from being available through the web service, all the objects are also visible in the so called "semantic web".
Updated: 2009-10-06

Number of objects in SOCH just now:

Statistics	Recently added objects	Changed objects
Last week
Last month

 
Note: Recently added objects fall into two categories. Firstly, there are recently registered objects in databases belonging to museums or other institutions. Secondly, there are objects in new data sources, i.e. objects that have been registered for a long time, but not available to SOCH until now.