Archive for September, 2007

groupthink

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

This little hack came up in channel after Bruce posted some XSLT to transform OCLC Identities XML into FOAF.

xsltproc \
  http://inkdroid.org/data/identity-foaf.xsl \
  http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/lccn-no99-10609 \
  | xmllint --format -

!!!

XSLT has its place to be sure.

Posted in metadata, web | 3 Comments »

OCLC deserves some REST

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

Hey Worldcat Identities you are doing awesome work–you deserve some REST. Why not use content-negotiation to serve up your HTML and XML representations? So:

  curl --header "Accept: text/html" http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/key/lccn-no99-10609

would return HTML and

  curl --header "Accept: application/xml" http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/key/lccn-no99-10609

would return XML. This would allow you to:

  • not be limited to XSLT driven user views (doesn’t that get tedious?)
  • allow you to scale to other sorts of output (application/rdf+xml, etc)

At least from the outside I’d have to disagree w/ Roy — it appears that institutions can and do innovate. But I won’t say it is easy …

Tags: ,
Posted in libraries, metadata, web | 2 Comments »