domingo, 3 de agosto de 2008

Library Thing introduces Free Web Services API to Common Knowledge

Y continuamos recibiendo buenas noticias y las compartimos.

El 1ro de agosto nos enteramos de que LibraryThing ha introducido nuevos campos de acceso dentro del proyecto Common Knowledge http://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/.

Common Knowledge es un proyecto de suma importancia para todos, pero especialmente para el curso de la Industria de la Información; en palabras de a centavo, de Adquisiciones, Desarrollo de Colecciones y Referencia. Como Library Thing declara en su descripción, "...es una tecnología que le permite al interesado contribuir hechos interesantes y datos sobre libros, autores, ediciones y otros ítemes dentro del universo de LibraryThing."

Para aquellos que no lo hayan hecho, familiarícense con LibraryThing, el proyecto Common Knowledge, la nueva función, suscríbanse y experimenten.

Recuerden visitar:
http://egcti.upr.edu
http://investigacreaeinnova.blogspot.com

Saludos,
Luisa Vigo-Cepeda
egctianauprblog@gmail.com
http://egctianauprblog.blogspot.com

Friday, August 01, 2008

Introducing the LibraryThing Web Services API.
http://www.librarything.com/blog/2008/08/free-web-services-api-to-common.php

API=Application Programming Interfaces: a set of declarations of the functions or procedures that an operting system, library or service provides to support requests made by computer programs
Definición tomada de Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API

The API will eventually do many things.

For starters it includes all of the data in LibraryThing's Common Knowledge project, our groundbreaking "fielded wiki" for interesting book information (see original blog post). It includes fields like series, important characters, important places, author dates, author burial places, agents, edits, etc. If you're interested in building or enhancing book-data applications, this should be very interesting.

Common Knowledge is always in progress, but the results so far have been quite impressive. Members have made over 500,000 edits, and certain data types have become exceedingly useful and comprehensive. I'm particularly proud of our Series coverage (eg., Star Wars), better—we think—than any commercial series data.

Oh, and it's free! The data is made available under the highly permissive Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Architecturally, the Web Services API is a straightforward REST XML-based API. The back-end is modular, allowing us to easily expand the available methods in the future. It's request and response styles were modeled closely on Flickr's API—Chris is a big fan—so it should make it easier to find similar sample code. The documentation resembles theirs too.

Kudos to Chris for his work on this and let us know what you think (here).

Update: The other big announcement—another data release—won't be happening today. Too much to do!

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posted by Tim at 1:46 PM

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