Final Progress Post
Title of Primary Project Output: JournalToCsAPI: An API to search current issues of journals for up-to-date content.
Screenshots or diagram of prototype:
Use Cases:
Description of Prototype:
JournalTOCs is a prototype of a web API(*) that uses the REST software architecture style to search the directory of journals and articles obtained directly from the publishers’ websites by aggregating their TOC RSS feeds (TOC: Table of Contents). The API produce search results in RSS 1.0 web feed format.
The API has four “calls”: journals, articles, user and institution. A “call” is a URL consisting of a base URL, the name of the call and the search query.
JournalTOCs API base URL is “http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/api“. To use the API you need to combine the base URL and the name of one call. Most calls require a search query or otherwise they won’t work. Guidelines for using each of the calls is found here.
(*) API is an abbreviation of Application Programming Interface. An API is a software programme that enable interaction between two software applications.
End User of Prototype:
The end-user for this API is a developer wanting to combine journal TOC RSS feeds with multiple services into new applications known as mashups. The API is written in PHP and uses MySQL as its back-end database system. You do not need an account to use the API which is free to use for anyone.
When your application points to the API base URL http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/api the API returns a brief description on how to use the API. The description is found in the <description> element of the unique item encoded in the RSS response. The following screen shows how the response is presented on a browser.
Below there is an example showing how to use the API from a PHP script so that you can get an idea on how to use the API calls.
If you print the content of $xmlRSS1, you will see that it is an XML file where each article of the search results is included in an <item> element as shown in the following screenshot.
Link to working prototype:
http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/api
Link to end user documentation:
http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/API
Link to code repository:
http://journaltocsapi.sourceforge.net
Link to technical documentation:
http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/docs/
Date prototype was launched:
– Beta Version Released 28th November 2009
– Alpha Version Released 23rd September 2009
Project Team Names, Emails and Organisations:
Roger Rist – Project Director [email protected]
Santy Chumbe – Project Manager [email protected]
Lisa Rogers – Project Officer [email protected]
ICBL, Heriot-Watt University
Project Blog:
http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/API/blog/
PIMS entry:
https://pims.jisc.ac.uk/projects/view/1390
Table of Content for Project Posts:
- Welcome to the journalTOCsAPI Project blog
- JournalTOCsAPI Project
- OAI-PMH instead of RSS feeds for Use Case 2?
- Community engagement: A special invitation
- Do we need a “best practice” for generating RSS’s URLs for IR search results?
- Community Engagement: Response to Invitation
- Methods of Engaging with JournalTOCsAPI Project
- Preparing the framework for our RESTful API
- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis
- Clarification of Use Cases
- Use Cases and Prerequisite Data
- Alpha Release of JournalTOCs API
- How do you want to be alerted?
- User Feedback (1-2 Development Cycle) – I
- User Feedback (1-2 Development Cycle) – II
- Author Affiliation
- The ticTOCs Best Practice Recommendation has been released
- Presentation at EUROCRIS
- journalTOCs API Project Workshop
- JournalTOCs Workshop: Presentation 1 – Introduction and Feedback
- JournalTOCs Workshop: Presentation 2 – Repositories and Alert Services
- JournalTOCs Workshop: Presentation 3 – Testing the First Use Case
- JournalTOCs Workshop: Presentation 4 – Bibliosight Project
- JournalTOCs Workshop: Presentation 5 – The Other Side of The Interface
- JOURNAL TOCS API Beta 1 Released
- JournalsTOCS API Technical Documentation
- JournalTOCs Workshop: Presentation 6 – TechXtra and TechJournalContents
- JournalTOCs Workshop: Presentation 7 – JournalTOCs in a CRIS
- Measuring the usefulness and effectiveness of the API: A retrospective view of prototyping the use cases
- Demonstrations of Using the JournalTOCs API
This entry was posted
on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Project Archive.
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