Code4lib, Day 1, Afternoon talks 2007 February 28
Afternoon talks:
Fabian Tiburce, Peter Giansante, and Beth Jefferson.
Forger the lipstick, this pig need social skills:
People don’t complain about the catalog, they just go elsewhere. The next generation catalog should be about discovering, not just about finding. People are interested with alternative ways of exploring for content. They went on and talked about some of their technology and future opportunities.
Kevin Clarke:
The XQuery Expose: Practical experiences from a digital library
XQuery is an XML Query language. XQuery specification doesn’t include full text searching and doesn’t currently support updating.This fulltext issue should be kept in mind if you are going to use it (Kevin didn’t realize this at first). However, some of the engines do support this. XQuery is able to integrate a XML data from a variety of sources. Kevin went on to give a good overview of what XQuery can and can’t do. I found it interesting on how XQuery can do booth loose and more structured syntaxes. After the overview, Kevin went on to talk about how Princeton University is using XQuery. Things they liked about XQuery, the freedom (nothing between you and your data), ease of use, now an official W3C standard.
Richard Wallis (From Talis):
All protocols that libraries use have a shared problem, wether they are obscure or not, is that they have an insular view of the world. They don’t play well with others. The solution, according to Talis, is an API (there example is the Bigfoot Store API). Richard demoed (live) the API and how different parts can be augmented. One of the things it can do is deep links into OPACs. Considering the network in the conference center, this was a risky approach, but seemed to work OK for him.Overall, it is an interesting project and makes you why other ILS vendors aren’t doing things like this.
Richard explained what you get with the Bigfoot Store API. They include:
Items: Query + XSLT output transform
Augment: Augment recognized elements as RSS 1.0 feeds
Facets: Request facets for a query
OAI-PMH (coming)
Ability to Custom Config (coming)
On demand Stores (coming)
Transform service
The demoed a WordPress minicat using there transform service. It looked really neat. I want to look at it more at http://tdn.talis.com