Comments on: AllConsuming Reading Lists in RDF

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 19:35:50 +0000

Excuse the obscenity, but that’s fucking great!

By: Leigh Dodds

Leigh Dodds — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 18:20:57 +0000

Local copies of my stuff:

They're now linked from my main FOAF description These don't change that fast, so I've just written a shelf script to invoke curl to grab the data, then run Saxon over it to produce the various outputs.

By: Leigh Dodds

Leigh Dodds — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:08:54 +0000

Update:
I’ve written a simple schema for describing reading lists. This allows me to properly state: X is reading Y, X has read Y, etc. The transform now uses this schema. I’ve stated that the isbn property is Inverse-Functional. The ISBN documentation states that ISBNs shouldn’t be re-used, so I believe this OK. So reading lists can now be smushed together.
The transform now correctly identifies which AllConsuming list you’ve requested and adds the appropriate properties. So you can now use the GetPurchasedBooksList, GetCompletedBooksList, GetFavouriteBooksList, and GetRereadingBooksList actions in the REST interface. The latter is interesting because I’m able to make two assertions: that you’ve read the book, and that you’re currently reading it.
There were a couple of other bug fixes to the transform (corrected XPath as noted by Morten in comments above), removing trailing full-stop on account name.
Remaining work is to add author names to the books, but I’m wary about parsing this in XSLT because of likelihood of having commas in the authors name. Need to check how Amazon returns these.
If there’s interest in transforming the other AllConsuming actions into RDF, then I could investigate this also.

By: Leigh Dodds

Leigh Dodds — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 13:25:58 +0000

Yes, the authors are there, but I wasn’t sure how best to parse them: they’re just a comma-separated list of names. I could just split on commas, but that gets tricky for names like “Joe Bloggs, Jr”.
I’m intending to dig a bit more into how AllConsuming handles names of that forms.
And no, it’s not linked from my FOAF yet because I wanted to fix up the bugs Morten reported. Later today…

By: captsolo

captsolo — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 03:22:36 +0000

Have you linked the reading list from your FOAF profile?
Maybe it is there but I don’t see it.

By: captsolo

captsolo — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 02:53:43 +0000

Very nice work!
If there is one thing I’d like to see – its the author(s) of the book.
It is present in the info extracted from AllConsuming, but not in the RDF version.

By: Leigh Dodds

Leigh Dodds — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 01:00:14 +0000

I’ve drafted a schema to properly associate people with their reading lists.
You can grab it from here, comments appreciated:
http://www.ldodds.com/schemas/book/index.rdf

By: Erik Benson's Morale-O-Meter

Erik Benson's Morale-O-Meter — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 23:32:39 +0000

Leigh Dodds has used an XSL stylesheet and converted All Consuming’s data (from my REST interface) into nice RDF

http://www.ldodds.com/blog/archives/000126.html...

By: Leigh Dodds

Leigh Dodds — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 19:49:34 +0000

Thanks Morten, good catch on the accountName, haven’t a clue why I didn’t see that myself.
I think I’ll whip up a simple vocab for reading lists, unless you know of one already. I could base it all on the AllConsuming categories, but these didn’t quite gel with me: reading and re-reading for example. It’s useful to have the extra granularity, but for a simple view of “what books is ldodds currently reading?” I need to combine these categories.

By: Morten Frederiksen

Morten Frederiksen — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 18:54:40 +0000

Very nice indeed, now all I need is an account on allconsuming…
BTW, the XPath for accountName should be “substring-after(header/@description, ‘ for ‘)” (it currently has …/@title).
Apart from the review “link” between between you and each of the books, shouldn’t there be a “currentlyReading” property?
Oh, and re local cron jobs, I do that myself for my Amazon wishlist…