Transcript Names Project Web Services and repositories workshop Daniel Needham What is the Names Project? • A JISC funded project in collaboration with the British Library •

Names Project
Web Services and repositories
workshop
Daniel Needham
What is the Names Project?
• A JISC funded project in collaboration with the
British Library
• Aims to investigate the potential and
requirements for a Name Authority Service
• As part of this a prototype service is under
development
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Overview of the prototype
• Envisaged as a piece of middle ware
• Pulls in data from external sources and attempts
to disambiguate unique entities
• Provides access to this data as a Web Service for
use by external repositories and services
• Potential for data feedback from repositories
through the web interface and user tool
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Architecture
Name Authority Service
Data source –
Web Service
Disambiguator
Web Service
Data Source –
Database Extract
Repository
Other Client App
Database
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Repository use case
Institutional Repository
Item Submission
Retrieve Names
Name Authority Service
Insert/Update record
Search Records
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Sample Output
• Associated Names
• Fields of Interest
• Titles
• Collaborative Relationships
• Associated Works
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Names as a Web Service
• Machine-to-machine access is provided via a
RESTful(ish) url based query interface
• Flexibility of the interface is a requirement
• Allow people to easily hook up their system to
utilize our records with the minimum of effort
• Provision of a variety of output formats
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Developing the service
• Developers were much more interested in
RESTful interfaces than SOAP
• REST provides quicker development time
–Less bloated
–Quicker to hack something up with!
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Developing the service
• Working with Cranfield University to develop and
validate the API
• Developing example code to demonstrate how
the service could be utilised to pull in entity
names into Dspace
• Investigating the possibility of sending data back
from a remote client to the service
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Developing the service
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Pros
• Web services can help centralise and standardise
functionality
• Web services can reduce duplication of work
• Build on each others work
• Do things we hadn't even considered
• But..
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Cons
•In order to appeal to developers they need to be
–Well documented
–Quick to integrate
–Flexible
•Needs to be reliable when integrated into
external work flows
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Summary
• I'm interested to hear from anyone who can
provide data on individuals for use in Names
• Also from anyone who would like to work with
the API in its current development state
• [email protected]
• http://names.mimas.ac.uk/
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09
Further reading
•Good source of information on RESTful web
services..
RESTful Web Services
by Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby
ISBN: 0596529260
Web Services and repositories workshop 02/06/09