Yes, that's correct.
However, if you already offer persistent URLs for item data in one or
more machine-readable formats (like MARC, or DC in XML), the additional
work that needs to be done is likely just a fairly small amount of
'glue' to make those alternate formats discoverable via unAPI. As other
machine-readable formats are made available in the future, they can be
incorporated into the unAPI "glue" advertising them as well. unAPI
makes no requirements about _which_ machine-readable formats are made
available, it's just a way of advertising their association, basically.
Jonathan
Karen Coyle wrote:
Thanks, Chad, it does help. And I think it helps me understand why I
was a bit confused by the suggestion, but let me see if I've gotten it:
I asked about COinS. COinS (drat, hate uplow, from now on just coins)
is basically just a formatted string imbedded in the html that will be
used by an external program. There is no service that the OL site
needs to provide other than popping the context object in there in the
right format. Very low effort, from the open library's point of view.
unAPI appears to require some lightweight services that would have to
be added to the OL site: basically, responding to the three possible
unapi requests. So we can't *just* add an unAPI to the html pages --
there's a bit more work that needs to be done.
Is this correct?
Thanks,
kc
Chad Fennell wrote:
On Dec 2, 2008, at 4:21 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
I've looked at unAPI, but I can't get a handle on what needs to be
in the <abbr>. What would be useful?
kc
I put together a pretty basic unAPI interface (technically, a Drupal
module) for our EthicShare project; you can see how the <abbr> tags
are used there. Ex:
http://ethicshare.org/publications/ethics?sc=publications
embedded on the page, you'll find things like: <abbr class='unapi-id'
title='http://ethicshare.org/unapi/374360'>
There are a few other pieces, but you can see these in action there
as well. Ex,
http://ethicshare.org/unapi/ -tells clients what formats are
available on the sever - I've only implemented RIS so far...
http://ethicshare.org/unapi/?id=374360 - tells the client what
formats are available for a given resource.
http://ethicshare.org/unapi/?id=374360&format=ris - kind of
self-explanatory.
Hope that helps a little...
Cheers,
-Chad
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
