I’ve wanted a Wikipedia API for a while. Now I might’ve stumbled into one: commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php. It doesn’t do exactly what I want, but it might yet be useful.

Posted October 30, 2008 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: api, web services, wikipedia. One Comment.

I prefaced my point about how the standards we choose in libraries isolate us from the larger stream of progress driving development outside libraries with the note that I was sure to get hanged for it.
It’s true.
I commented that there were over 140,00 registered Amazon API developers and 365 public OpenSearch targets (hey look, there’s [...]

Posted February 23, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy. Tags: a9, amazon api, amazon web services, argument, AWS, cage match, code4lib, code4lib 2006, future libraries, information retrieval, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library standards, opensearch, search, search and retrieval, search retrieval, sru/srw, srw/sru, web services. 6 Comments.

No, I’m not talking about the interface our users see in the web browser — there’s enough argument about that — I’m talking about web services, the technologies that form much of the infrastructure for Web 2.0.
Once upon a time, the technology that displayed a set of data, let’s say catalog records, was inextricably [...]

Posted November 30, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: amazon, amazon api, amazon web services, api, dublin core, ead, libraries, library, library catalog, marc, marc-xml, opac data, opensearch, web 2.0, web service, web services, web20, webservice, webservices, xml, xml server. 8 Comments.

I want Wikipedia to have an API, but it doesn’t. Some web searching turned up Gina Trapani’s WikipedizeText, but that still wasn’t exactly what I wanted. A note in the source code, however, put me back on the trail to the Wikipedia database downloads, and while that’s not what I want, I did learn that [...]

Posted August 21, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: api, application programming interface, article titles, database download, free encyclopedia, hacking, rss, web services, webservices, wikipedia, xml. 11 Comments.