Month: August 2015

Zotero, Web APIs, and data formats

I’ve been doing some work recently (for a couple of different clients) with Zotero, the popular reference management software. I’ve always been a big fan of the product. It has a number of great features, including the fact that it integrates with users’ browsers, and can read metadata out of web pages, PDF files, linked data, and a whole bunch of APIs.

zotero

One especially nice feature of Zotero is that you can use it to collaborate with a group of people on a shared library of data which is stored in the cloud and synchronized to the devices of the group members.
Continue reading Zotero, Web APIs, and data formats

Proxying: a trick to easily add features to existing websites and applications

At the start of last month I attended the LODLAM (Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums) Summit in Sydney, in the lovely Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales.

The Summit is organised as an “un-conference”. There is no pre-defined agenda; it’s organised by the participants themselves at the start of the day. It makes it a very participatory event; your brain is in top gear the whole time and everything is so interesting you end up feeling a bit stunned at the end of the day.

One of the features of the Summit was a series of very brief talks (“speedos”) on a variety of topics. At the last minute I decided I’d contribute a quick rant on a particular hobby-horse of mine: the value of using proxies to build web applications, Linked Open Data, and so on. Continue reading Proxying: a trick to easily add features to existing websites and applications