Tag: REST

A tool for Web API harvesting

A medieval man harvesting metadata from a medieval Web API

As 2016 stumbles to an end, I’ve put in a few days’ work on my new project Oceania, which is to be a Linked Data service for cultural heritage in this part of the world. Part of this project involves harvesting data from cultural institutions which make their collections available via so-called “Web APIs”. There are some very standard ways to publish data, such as OAI-PMH, OpenSearch, SRU, RSS, etc, but many cultural heritage institutions instead offer custom-built APIs that work in their own peculiar way, which means that you need to put in a certain amount of effort in learning each API and dealing with its specific requirements. So I’ve turned to the problem of how to deal with these APIs in the most generic way possible, and written a program that can handle a lot of what is common in most Web APIs, and can be easily configured to understand the specifics of particular APIs.
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Linked Open Data built from a custom web API

I’ve spent a bit of time just recently poking at the new Web API of Museum Victoria Collections, and making a Linked Open Data service based on their API.

I’m writing this up as an example of one way — a relatively easy way — to publish Linked Data off the back of some existing API. I hope that some other libraries, archives, and museums with their own API will adopt this approach and start publishing their data in a standard Linked Data style, so it can be linked up with the wider web of data.

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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.
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