It’s been great to see RDFa being picked up by web2.0 publishers like Digg and MySpace. You can use the RDFa Distiller to extract the RDFa from a given web page u by constructing a URI like:
http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/extract?format=turtle&uri=u
Which translates kind of nicely into a command line utility to add to your ~/bin:
#!/bin/sh
curl “http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/extract?format=turtle&uri=$1″
So with that [...]
Thanks to some prodding from William Denton and Jason Ronallo and the kindness of Laurent Sansonetti I’ve been added as a developer to the ruby-zoom project which provides a Ruby wrapper to the yaz Z39.50 library. I essentially wanted to remove some unused code from the project that was interfering with the ruby-marc gem … [...]
Thursday, September 28, 2006
So Ross beat out 11 other projects to win the OCLC Research Software Contest for his next generation OpenURL resolver umlaut. Second place went to to Jesse Andrews’ BookBurro–so the competition was fierce this year. Much more so than last year when there were 4 contestants.
Those of us who hang out in #code4lib got to [...]
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
v0.0.3 of ruby-oai was just released to RubyForge. The big news is that this release allows you to use libxml for parsing thanks to the efforts of Terry Reese. Terry is building a RubyOnRails metasearch application at OSU and, well, felt the need for speed.
After committing the branch he was working on I ran some [...]
Dan, Jeremy, Peter, Michael, Mike, Ross and I wrote an article in the latest Ariadne introducing the lightweight web protocol unAPI. Essentially unAPI is an easy way to include references to digital objects in your HTML which can then be predictably retrieved by a machine…yes ‘machine’ includes JavaScript running in a browser :-) Dan and [...]
Saturday, August 12, 2006
When developing and deploying RubyOnRails applications you’ve often got to think about the gem dependencies your project might have. It’s particularly useful to freeze a version of rails in your vendor directory so that your app uses that version of rails rather than a globally installed (or not installed) one. It’s easy to do this [...]
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At work I’ve been doing some experiments with the Fedora repository software. One of the strengths of Fedora is that it is fundamentally designed as a set of extensible web services. At first I set about becoming familiar with the set of web services and decided that Ruby would be a useful and lightweight language [...]
As part of my day job I’ve been rifling through large foreign XML files–learning the rhyme and reason of tags used, looking at content, etc… I opened files in Firefox and vim and that was OK–but I like working from the command line. After minimal searching I wasn’t able to find a suitable tool that [...]
I prefer using an XML generating mini-language (elementtree, XML::Writer, REXML, Stan, etc) to actually writing raw XML. It’s just too easy for me to forget or misstype an end tag, or forget to encode strings properly–and I find all those inline strings or even here-docs make a mess of an otherwise pretty program.
Recently I [...]
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Wednesday, April 26, 2006
It’s nice to see that BBC Programme Catalogue (built with RubyOnRails and MySQL) has gone live. Here is some historical background from the about page:
The BBC has been cataloguing and indexing its programmes since the 1920s. The development of the programme catalogue has reflected the changes in the BBC and in broadcasting over the last [...]
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