Hi -
I was having a quick look at the Programme Catalogue (amazing
what the OU has put out over the years -
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/006117.html) and a couple of things
came to mind:
- is there an API/any way of making a query to the catalogue
that will return an XML response?
- are you going to offer support for sparql (the reason i ask
is that's the way the Talis/Silkworm/library webservice
(http://directory.talis.com/ui/) API looks like it's going -
http://api.talis.com/1/dir/sparql)
- is the catalgoue reference number coding scheme
hackable/defined according to some convention? If so, is the convention
published anywhere?
- is it possible to make compound(?) queries on the catalogue -
e.g. to search for series "Dr WHo" AND contributor(?) Tom Baker
thanks
tony
Hi Tony,
Yes there are API's - loads of them! If you perform your search you
should see "Feeds" for every page returned.
For example http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/contributor/4362 (Tony
Blair) returns FOAF data
(http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/xml/contributor/4362) and an Atom dump
(http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/feed/contributor/4362).
If you want to convert your web-based searches into REST-like requests,
you want to pick out the "/infax/" in the url and change it to "/xml/"
and "/feed/".
I don't know anything about Sparql so I'll check it out.
As far as I know advanced Boolean searches aren't currently implemented,
but I'll feed back to the team who worked on this that people (seem to)
want it.
Cheers
Ben :: backstage.bbc.co.uk
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