Ex Situ
Open-source spatial index of displaced cultural artifacts
Details
- External ID
- 48988158
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Ex Situ
- Website domain
- exsitu.app
- Launched
- July 21, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 51
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8512544802867383
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hi, I designed and developed a spatial index that maps museum artefacts as connecting arcs/hyperlinks from their origin site to institutional location/sources. The Index specifically looks at western/euro-american institutions and maps their collection categorised by them under Islamic art, Asian/African art, ethnological collections, Middle East, South America etc.Started as my MA thesis in 2022, kept building since, mostly solo with a little funding. Fully open source, self-hosted, AGPL-3.0, Next.js + Deck.gl on the frontend, Strapi backend, Python ETL pulling from museum open-access APIs. Currently indexing over 100k artifacts from all over the world, across 8 collections (Met, V&A, SMB Berlin). Recently added an md export so researchers can download provenance data for a filtered set of artifacts.The infrastructure is conceptualized as an indexer, not a hoster. Even images are kept as URLs pointing to the source institutions. It's connective tissue between archives that were never designed to speak to each other, with an origin-first search UI concept. The data model is on purpose flat, to avoid encoding problematic taxonomies, and routes researchers directly to the source giving responsibility to the source institutions rather than duplicating institutional data. It indexes the relationship between origin sites and destination collections.Coming from a design background, taking this project from prototype to production app has been incredibly rewarding, but honestly it’s getting a little bit overwhelming to scale alone. I would love community’s feedback on performance scaling, any code contributions, data pipelines for missing museum apis or general feedback.Repo: https://github.com/hburakyel/ex-situLive: https://exsitu.app
Enrichment
- Theme
- space and geospatial visualization tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- spatial index for cultural artifacts
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is an interactive map interface that visualizes museum catalog metadata using standard mapping libraries (e.g., Mapbox or Deck.gl) with arc layers.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Search/filter functionality unclear - clicking location doesn't filter out other artifacts, Performance at scale - 200k artifacts causes lag at low zoom levels, Too many lines on map makes visualization hard to interpret, Data completeness - major museums like British Museum not included in dataset
Feature requests: Ability to filter/hide lines to reduce visual clutter, Contribution mechanism for user-submitted artifact data, Database of cultural artifacts destroyed by origin countries, Clearer search/filter interface for location-based filtering
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 71 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #11 of 72 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 253 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.