Hello, everyone! My company is working on a Semantic Web-enabled search engine. OpenLibrary is one of our data sources and we are quite pleased with both the data and the API.
However, we do have a couple of suggestions/questions: 1) When a JSON response references another object, would it be possible to include the name/title of the referenced object? This would reduce the need to make another call just to retrieve the referenced object's name/title for display to the user. For example, consider http://openlibrary.org/works/OL82592W.json (the JSON view of the work Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone). The authors property has the following JSON content: authors: [ { type: { key: "/type/author_role" }, author: { key: "/authors/OL23919A" } } ] If each value in the authors array instead include the author's name, like this, we could avoid having to make another Web service call simply to get the author's name. authors: [ { type: { key: "/type/author_role" }, author: { key: "/authors/OL23919A", name: "J. K. Rowling" } } ] 2) We have noticed some vandalism of the data, as in the description of this edition: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23818172M/Harry_Potter_and_The_Sorcerer's_Stone. We understand that some vandalism will occur in open data sources, just as it does in Wikipedia (for example), and will correct it as we encounter it. That said, have you (the OpenLibrary team) considered reducing vandalism by prohibiting editing by anonymous users (like Freebase does, for example), suspending accounts of users who commit vandalism, or other measures? Again, thank you for making such a great data source available through an open API! We look forward to becoming part of the community and making our own contributions to the effort. ---- John J. Szucs, Chief Scientist, lusidity [email protected], M: (919) 924-2183 _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
