A Web Mashup for Social Libraries

Domenico Gendarmi and Filippo Lanubile talk about a Web Mashup for Social Libraries.

The goal of Domenico’s project (Colibrary) is to provide a web API to reuse content in the digital library domain. Domenico’s provides us with a system overview. For books you input an ISBN which is searched for on various book indexes (such as Amazon, etc.) and the Colibrary creates an RDF description of the book. Colibrary provides the same system for publications and papers, it queries databases such as Citeulike, bibsonomy, ACM digital library and creates an RDF description of the publication.

Domenico then elaborates on the main features of Colibrary. It provides a RESTful API which enables developers and people to create applications on top of Colibrary. He further explains that they had to use screen-scrapers since the API of books and papers databases did not provide all the functionality they needed. For instance Amazon did not provide them with a way to query social features related to books, like tags and reviews which Colibrary supports.

Domenico goes on demoing the application. He first searches for an author, the UI directly gives him the ISBN corresponding to this author. Once he selected the correct ISBN he gets an RDF and its visualization on a web page. He can further request for social artefacts for this book like tags and reviews which again, are gathered using screen-scraping. He then shows the use of the API, given a ISBN you can for instance retrieve all the reviews in the RDF format and use this data in your own application.

The API is available for testing on: http://collab.di.uniba.it/Colibrary/books/doc.html and http://collab.di.uniba.it/Colibrary/publications/doc_pubs.html and the client on: http://collab.di.uniba.it/ColibraryClient/
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