[VuFind-Tech] API-based authority data in VuFind (and new demo instance)

[Demian K. <dem...@vi...>]

Two quick updates to this:

1.) I've just improved the code for using the Terminologies API; the recommendations now seem significantly more useful than before.

2.) To allow people to test out new features like this, I have set up a new "bleeding edge" demo on vufind.org.  I'll leave up the standard http://vufind.org/demo instance to show off the latest official release (currently RC2), but now you can also go to http://vufind.org/demo_trunk to see a demo running on even newer code.  For example, here's a demo of the terminologies API recommendation module:

http://vufind.org/demo_trunk/Search/Results?lookfor=pigs&type=Subject

Please let me know what you think... and let me know if you would like me to configure any particular settings on the new demo to let you try things out.

I'm not sure how often I'll update this, but I'll try to keep it fairly close to the latest code, and I'll happily update by request if I happen to forget to do it unprompted.

- Demian

From: Demian Katz
Sent: Friday, March 05, 2010 12:55 PM
To: vuf...@li...
Subject: API-based authority data in VuFind

At this year's code4lib, I participated in some discussions about using API-based authority data in VuFind.  I've just put together a quick test-of-concept to demonstrate how this could work.  As of r2314, I have added a WorldCatTerms recommendations module which uses the WorldCat Terminologies API to suggest broader, narrower and related terms based on a user's search.  To test this out, just load the latest SVN code, uncomment the "Subjects[] = WorldCatTerms" line in web/conf/searches.ini, and do a subject search.

There's obviously room for refinement here, but I was fairly impressed by how even this simple code can offer useful suggestions.  I'd be interested to hear what others think.

I should also mention that the basic concept here was inspired by Eric Lease Morgan's TermFinder demo (http://zoia.library.nd.edu/sandbox/term-finder/).  What I ended up with is significantly different from his work, but the initial API calls are the same, and I owe him thanks for providing the sample code that I used as a seed.

- Demian