Bigfoot - An initial tour

This article is designed to be an initial introduction to Bigfoot Stores and the APIs and services you can expect from one.

The starting point for this is a set of stores that have already been created and populated. Other articles will go in to the creation of, and the loading of data in to, stores.

In this tour we will use two stores:

• Ukbib – This store contains several million bibliographic records contributed to the Talis Platform by UK Libraries.
• Wikipedia – This store contains abstracts from the English version of Wikipedia as provided by the Data Dump service of Wikimedia.

So let the tour begin, with a search for items in the store

The store items search uri is:
http://api.talis.com/bf/stores/ukbib/items

This links you to the default, you haven't provided any parameters, interface. The search prompt takes a basic search syntax the following are all valid queries:

• darwin
• title:origin
• author:darwin title:origin

Enter your search term and click 'Search'.

Firstly, if you use Internet Explorer 7, or an unmodified Firefox version 2 browser, to access the APIs you will see them attempt to format the results as an RSS feed. In Firefox you can turn off this behaviour and display the raw XML by following these instructions: HOWTO Disable Firefox 2's Feed Preview or of course you can always use the browser’s view source option.

Back to the items search api. By using the optional offset value you can page through a result set, and with the optional XSL Stylesheet and Content-Type you can format the output. At all times, when you do a search you will see the api call that an application would have to create in the browser address bar on the results display.

The store also has a facet api:
http://api.talis.com/bf/stores/ukbib/services/facet

The search is as for the items search. In the fields prompt you enter a comma separated list of one or more facet fields - eg. title,subject,author,date,publisher. The Maximum facets option, controls the number of each facet to return. The 'output as' defaults to xml which is what an application will consume, but to explore the facets of a search I suggest you set it to html so that you can browse through the facets. Again the actual API call evolves in the browser address prompt as you do this.

The final API, I will currently explain is the augmentation API:
http://api.talis.com/bf/stores/ukbib/services/augment

This takes as its input a uri which should contain an RSS 1.0 feed of results. If the augmentation service recognises a result it will add its data to that result.

Showing is easier than telling:

• If you get some ISBNs, from say OCLC's xISBN service:
  http://old-xisbn.oclc.org/webservices/xisbn/041597013X
• Then use the Platform transform service: http://api.talis.com/tx:
  • to transform that xml-uri
  • using a simple style sheet located at xsl-uri
    http://research.talis.com/2006/rjw/xslt/xisbn2rdf.xsl
  • and a content type of text/xml
  • we get the xISBN data in an RSS 1.0 format:
    http://api.talis.com/tx?xml-uri=http%3A%2F%2Fold-xisbn.oclc.org%2F
    webservices%2Fxisbn%2F041597013X&xsl-uri=http%3A%2F%2F
    research.talis.com%2F2006%2Frjw%2Fxslt%2Fxisbn2rdf.xsl
    &content-type=text%2Fxml
• If you then paste that uri in to the store's augment prompt you will see that in the resultant output the ISBN elements have been augmented with bibliographic data.

In the same way the output from the Ukbib store can be augmented by data from another store. For example using the store containing Wikipedia extracts. So:

• If you take the output from our original item query:
  http://api.talis.com/bf/stores/ukbib/items?query=darwin
  &max=10&offset=0&xsl=&content-type=
• and paste it in to the augment service of the Wikipedia store:
  http://api.talis.com/bf/stores/wikipedia/services/augment

You will see some of the results have links to Wekipedia articles about the authors - in this case the item with the title Literary Darwinism : evolution, human nature, and literature has a link information for a Wikipedia article about Joseph Carroll added to it.

I think that is enough to get you started. Have a play and then have a look at the other User Guide and Reference documentation.