(Click image to enlarge.)

[Update – 2009.10.05: This post (2. Clients) is one of three. See also: 1. Service, 3. Widgets.]

The previous post described the nature.com OpenSearch service. Prior to that I posted on our new desktop widgets which use one of the XML interfaces – specifically the RSS feed.

Here we wanted to also show what can be done in the browser itself. We’ve created a small gallery of demo clients which all use the text-based JSON interface (or rather JSONP for cross-site scripting purposes). You can find the demos here:

https://nurture.nature.com/opensearch/apps

These demo apps show how the JSON interface can be used to build very simple web clients for search. They make use of an early OpenSearch JavaScript library which has classes for OpenSearch and SRU responses. The demos show how to link back to the nature.com platform (using the DOI), how to locate metadata properties, how to use OpenSearch links for pagination, how to compare OpenSearch and SRU views, how to extract RDF triples, etc. They are simply intended to show how easy it is to access nature.com search remotely. We hope you find them fun to use.

(Click image to enlarge.)

[Update – 2009.10.05: This post (2. Clients) is one of three. See also: 1. Service, 3. Widgets.]

The previous post described the nature.com OpenSearch service. Prior to that I posted on our new desktop widgets which use one of the XML interfaces – specifically the RSS feed.

Here we wanted to also show what can be done in the browser itself. We’ve created a small gallery of demo clients which all use the text-based JSON interface (or rather JSONP for cross-site scripting purposes). You can find the demos here:

https://nurture.nature.com/opensearch/apps

These demo apps show how the JSON interface can be used to build very simple web clients for search. They make use of an early OpenSearch JavaScript library which has classes for OpenSearch and SRU responses. The demos show how to link back to the nature.com platform (using the DOI), how to locate metadata properties, how to use OpenSearch links for pagination, how to compare OpenSearch and SRU views, how to extract RDF triples, etc. They are simply intended to show how easy it is to access nature.com search remotely. We hope you find them fun to use.

(Click image to enlarge.)

[Update – 2009.10.05: This post (1. Service) is one of three. See also: 2. Clients, 3. Widgets.]

Earlier this week we soft-launched a new service: nature.com OpenSearch. Simply put, nature.com OpenSearch provides a structured resource discovery facility for content hosted on nature.com. In effect, this is a sister service to our regular nature.com search service which allows a user to query nature.com and browse the result sets. By contrast, the new service allows applications to query nature.com and to fetch the results back in formats of their choosing. The diagram above attempts to compare the existing user-oriented nature.com search service at a) with the new application-oriented nature.com OpenSearch service at b). Applications from widgets to web pages (and beyond) are the immediate clients of the service. (A companion post here already discussed the new nature.com search search widgets which are one such application.)

In terms of interfacing to the service, machine-readable description documents are available for both OpenSearch and SRU (Search and Retrieval via URL) modes of access. These documents are referenced from autodiscovery links which are beginning to be added to all our nature.com web pages. Each web page thus links not only to our search, but more than that it provides the instructions on ‘how to search’.

Query is either by simple search terms or by the query language CQL which is a high-level query language designed to be be human readable and writable, and to be intuitive while maintaining the expressiveness of more complex languages. Result sets can be returned in a variety of media types, both text (HTML and JSON) and XML (SRU, ATOM, RSS). Media types are selectable using HTTP content negotiation or by using the specific parameter ‘httpAccept’.

(Click image to enlarge.)

And what does this all mean? Well, it really amounts to the ability to run off-platform search, i.e. I can now run my search over nature.com anywhere I choose to run it. For example, say I want to run it right here in this blog post, I can. Let’s jig up a simple interface. What we’ll do is to run a full-text keyword search and just list out the raw properties of the first item returned with no real attempt at styling. (The CQL checkbox just allows a CQL query to be input, otherwise the search terms are sent to the server as simple alternates.)

Continue reading →

(Click image to enlarge.)

[Update – 2009.10.05: This post (1. Service) is one of three. See also: 2. Clients, 3. Widgets.]

Earlier this week we soft-launched a new service: nature.com OpenSearch. Simply put, nature.com OpenSearch provides a structured resource discovery facility for content hosted on nature.com. In effect, this is a sister service to our regular nature.com search service which allows a user to query nature.com and browse the result sets. By contrast, the new service allows applications to query nature.com and to fetch the results back in formats of their choosing. The diagram above attempts to compare the existing user-oriented nature.com search service at a) with the new application-oriented nature.com OpenSearch service at b). Applications from widgets to web pages (and beyond) are the immediate clients of the service. (A companion post here already discussed the new nature.com search search widgets which are one such application.)

In terms of interfacing to the service, machine-readable description documents are available for both OpenSearch and SRU (Search and Retrieval via URL) modes of access. These documents are referenced from autodiscovery links which are beginning to be added to all our nature.com web pages. Each web page thus links not only to our search, but more than that it provides the instructions on ‘how to search’.

Query is either by simple search terms or by the query language CQL which is a high-level query language designed to be be human readable and writable, and to be intuitive while maintaining the expressiveness of more complex languages. Result sets can be returned in a variety of media types, both text (HTML and JSON) and XML (SRU, ATOM, RSS). Media types are selectable using HTTP content negotiation or by using the specific parameter ‘httpAccept’.

(Click image to enlarge.)

And what does this all mean? Well, it really amounts to the ability to run off-platform search, i.e. I can now run my search over nature.com anywhere I choose to run it. For example, say I want to run it right here in this blog post, I can. Let’s jig up a simple interface. What we’ll do is to run a full-text keyword search and just list out the raw properties of the first item returned with no real attempt at styling. (The CQL checkbox just allows a CQL query to be input, otherwise the search terms are sent to the server as simple alternates.)

Continue reading →

[Update – 2009.10.05: This post (3. Widgets) is one of three. See also: 1. Service, 2. Clients.]

The newly launched nature.com OpenSearch web service (which I’ll discuss in a separate post) is an interface that provides distributed access to search on the nature.com platform. Specifically, the interface allows for structured queries from remote clients as well as for structured responses, and implements two compatible industry standards for search: OpenSearch and SRU (Search and Retrieval via URL)

As a practical demonstration of this distributed access we have developed a nature.com search desktop widget which is a small standalone app that runs on a user’s desktop and interacts with the nature.com OpenSearch server by sending a simple URL request and receiving in response a regular RSS feed. This URL request closely mirrors the request strings in the OpenSearch URL templates that are now being linked to from a growing number of our web pages.

Continue reading →

[Update – 2009.10.05: This post (3. Widgets) is one of three. See also: 1. Service, 2. Clients.]

The newly launched nature.com OpenSearch web service (which I’ll discuss in a separate post) is an interface that provides distributed access to search on the nature.com platform. Specifically, the interface allows for structured queries from remote clients as well as for structured responses, and implements two compatible industry standards for search: OpenSearch and SRU (Search and Retrieval via URL)

As a practical demonstration of this distributed access we have developed a nature.com search desktop widget which is a small standalone app that runs on a user’s desktop and interacts with the nature.com OpenSearch server by sending a simple URL request and receiving in response a regular RSS feed. This URL request closely mirrors the request strings in the OpenSearch URL templates that are now being linked to from a growing number of our web pages.

Continue reading →

We just added last week a new section under our Librarian Gateway – Public Interfaces.

This is the beginning of a general documentation facility to cover all the various interfaces we are using on the nature.com platform for discovery and linking.

The aim is to consolidate technical documentation on the sometimes bewildering array of acronyms and to provide additional references to sources of information for users. Although this is listed under the Librarian Gateway the technologies listed here will be of interest not only to digital librarians but also to other communities as well.

We have kicked this section off with some well-established routes into nature.com: DOI and OpenURL. We have also added some of the newer means for disclosing metadata through self-describing content: META tags for HTML, and XMP for PDF. And we’ve also provided details on our new OAI–PMH service, as well as saying something about our long-standing stable of RSS feeds.

Further suggestions on how to improve these pages regarding what should be added or other changes we could make would be more than welcome.

We just added last week a new section under our Librarian Gateway – Public Interfaces.

This is the beginning of a general documentation facility to cover all the various interfaces we are using on the nature.com platform for discovery and linking.

The aim is to consolidate technical documentation on the sometimes bewildering array of acronyms and to provide additional references to sources of information for users. Although this is listed under the Librarian Gateway the technologies listed here will be of interest not only to digital librarians but also to other communities as well.

We have kicked this section off with some well-established routes into nature.com: DOI and OpenURL. We have also added some of the newer means for disclosing metadata through self-describing content: META tags for HTML, and XMP for PDF. And we’ve also provided details on our new OAI–PMH service, as well as saying something about our long-standing stable of RSS feeds.

Further suggestions on how to improve these pages regarding what should be added or other changes we could make would be more than welcome.