unAPI news

Our latest article is “Introducing unAPI” and is available in Ariadne 48:

“Daniel Chudnov, Peter Binkley, Jeremy Frumkin, Michael J. Giarlo, Mike Rylander, Ross Singer and Ed Summers describe unAPI, a tiny HTTP API for serving information objects in next-generation Web applications.”

That’s right, seven authors! For the record, everybody on the list was invited to participate; those listed here are those willing and able folks who responded. Here’s the intro:

“Common Web tools and techniques cannot easily manipulate library resources. While photo sharing, link logging, and Web logging sites make it easy to use and reuse content, barriers still exist that limit the reuse of library resources within new Web services. To support the reuse of library information in Web 2.0-style services, we need to allow many types of applications to connect with our information resources more easily. One such connection is a universal method to copy any resource of interest. Because the copy-and-paste paradigm resonates with both users and Web developers, it makes sense that users should be able to copy items they see online and paste them into desktop applications or other Web applications. Recent developments proposed in weblogs and discussed at technical conferences suggest exactly this: extending the ‘clipboard’ copy-and-paste paradigm onto the Web. To fit this new, extended paradigm, we need to provide a uniform, simple method for copying rich digital objects out of any Web application.” [citations elided; see the full article!]

In the article we quickly survey ongoing efforts to support web copy-and-paste, and tell the tale of early attempts to provide a “copy” function via OpenURL and OAI-PMH. Then we explain why we think that failed, and our simpler solution: unAPI.

The best part of the article is the long list of working examples. The authors contributed live links to their own unAPI-enabled sites and descriptions thereof; read the article and follow their links to see unAPI in action.

Xiaoming Liu has started a unAPI wiki and seeded it with a list of existing formats found in unAPI services.

This will be really useful as more unAPI services come online… if you’re starting to implement unAPI yourself, check this list first. If your formats aren’t on the list, follow the format name recommendation process to come up with and register it..

unAPI mentions appear in both the latest issue of Ariadne: “Serving Services in Web 2.0” by Theo van Veen, and in the latest issue of D-Lib — “Digital Library Federation (DLF) Aquifer Project” by Katherine Kott et al.