OCLC Developer Network

New demos for Access presentation

I'm presenting on OCLC Web Services at Access this week and I wanted to have some new stuff to show off at the conference. As a result, I wrote two new demos which show off OCLC Web Services and other APIs. One demo is an extension of the code I wrote at the Boston Mashathon. The idea is to build a timeline of publication dates of the most popular item by a given author using data from WorldCat Identities and the Simile Javascript library. You can see an example of the code in action on my demo space. The second demo I built was a tag cloud of FAST terms for a given item. The cloud is created by sending the OCLC Number of the item to the Classify web service and retrieving all the FAST headings. Then each heading passed to Classify a second time to get a count of the number of items with that heading in WorldCat. Once I have the headings and their count, I pass this as JSON to a JQuery javascript and it builds the tag cloud. This example is also on my demo space. The code for both of these and all the demonstrations I've created as part of Developer Network can be readily downloaded from the Developer Network Subversion repository. Hopefully, I'll have some time to write up detailed explanations of how each of these work in the near future and also work on some more demos that use Identities data and the Google Chart API. Thanks of the Hackfest I now know how to do nice charts with the Google API!

Comments

re: New demos for Access presentation

I don't know if you've seen it, here's my attempt at a sort of timeline/histogram of publication dates in a result set, built on Solr.

look at the bottom of the page on:
http://blacklight.mse.jhu.edu/demo

Or look in the right sidebar here:
https://blacklight.mse.jhu.edu/demo/catalog?commit=search&search_field=all_fields&q=surrealism&range[pub_date_sort][begin]=1930&range[pub_date_sort][end]=2004&commit=Limit

This is just our demo work-in-progress of what will become our future catalog, but is still in development (ie, it might go down, have bad data, etc). You can do your own searches, see the results on the timeline/histogram thing, narrow in to a specific date field and see a zoomed in timeliney thing, etc.

The resolution is approximately 10 "chunks", on the timeline, things within 1/10th of the range displayed are all just lumped together/averaged out. I might be able to raise this resolution, perhaps significantly, without effecting performance, but I haven't tried it, this seems good enough for now. There is of course a screen limit of pixels for resolution, but probably way before you reach that you'd run into performance problems trying to have too many 'chunks' of resolution.

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