Does any software currently look for links with type application/json? I
could see that being useful, but only if we also specify the "schema" for
the returned JSON object.
i.e. instead of a link of type application/json a link something more like
application/book+json where the returned JSON object has a known
structure.
This would be similar to how RSS feeds can be indicated using a link of
type application/rss+xml. If the link were just application/xml how would
you know it was RSS?
Open Library already has its own JSON "book" schema but a metadata format
is not so useful if it's just used on one site!
- mang
> The use case is that software that's looking at that page can easily see
> that there's a json representation of it available, and where to get it.
> This is not for raw human use, it's for software use.
>
> Examples of software that might be 'looking' at an OpenLibrary item
> detail page include:
> * a browser plug-in like LibX, looking over the user's shoulder as he
> browses the web.
> * A web spider of some kind
> * An OAI-PMH client of an OAI-PMH feed that includes OpenLibrary pages.
> (feed provided by OL/IA itself, or an OAI-PMH feed provided by a third
> party but indexing OL content).
> * Many more uses that we can't predict right now, but which people will
> come up with when the architecture is there.
>
> The link that Ed suggests is to advertise in a standard
> software-understandable way "There is a JSON representation of this
> resource available." A button that can be seen by humans may or may not
> be a good idea, depending on if you think humans are interested in
> clicking to get a JSON representation (I doubt it). The link Ed
> suggests is for a different purpose, for automated discovery of the json
> representation of the resource represented by the url.
>
> Jonathan
>
> Karen Coyle wrote:
>> Ed Summers wrote:
>>> I guess the main thing I wanted to
>>> communicate is that you could simply add:
>>>
>>> <link rel="alternate" type="application/json"
>>> href="http://openlibrary.org/api/get?key=/b/{open-library-id}" />
>>>
>>> to the <head> element in OpenLibrary HTML pages for books, and that
>>> would go a long way to making machine readable data for books
>>> discoverable by web clients.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> Ed, the first thing that comes to my mind when I see this is: button.
>> Unless folks will be blindly crawling the OL* I don't know how they'll
>> get to a particular page to execute this code, except by being a
>> person searching and getting the web page. (If they are using the
>> search API they get back a list of IDs from which they'd create one or
>> more 'get' commands like this one.) A download button on the page
>> would make sense, but mainly if it downloaded into a usable format
>> (EndNote, MARC). All this to say that I don't get what the use case is
>> for this particular bit of code -- but I'm assuming you had one in
>> mind. Please do tell!
>>
>> * If anyone wants the whole OL database, json dumps are available:
>> http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/jsondump
>>
>
> --
> Jonathan Rochkind
> Digital Services Software Engineer
> The Sheridan Libraries
> Johns Hopkins University
> 410.516.8886
> rochkind (at) jhu.edu
>
