For those of you interested in the developer competition being run by the JISC MOSAIC Project, I've put together a quick & dirty API for the available data sets. If it's easier for you, you can use this API to develop your competition entry rather than working with the entire downloaded data set.
edit (31/Jul/2009): Just to clarify — the developer competition is open to anyone, not just UK residents (however, UK law applies to how the competition is being run). Fingers crossed, the Project Team is hopeful that a few more UK academic libraries will be adding their data sets to the pot in early August.
The URL to use for the API is http://library.hud.ac.uk/mosaic/api.pl and you'll need to supply a ucas and/or isbn parameter to get a response back (in XML), e.g.:
- http://library.hud.ac.uk/mosaic/api.pl?isbn=0131249339
- http://library.hud.ac.uk/mosaic/api.pl?ucas=B390
- http://library.hud.ac.uk/mosaic/api.pl?isbn=0131249339&ucas=G600
The "ucas" value is a UCAS Course Code. You can find these codes by going to the UCAS web site and doing a "search by subject". Not all codes will generate output using the API, but you can find a list of codes that do appear in the MOSAIC data sets here.
If you use both a "ucas" and "isbn" value, the output will be limited to just transactions for that ISBN on courses with that UCAS course code.
You can also use these extra parameters in the URL…
- show=summary — only show the summary section in the XML output
- show=data — only show the data in the XML output (i.e. hide the summary)
- prog=… — only show data for the specified progression level (e.g. staff, UG1, etc, see documentation for full list)
- year=… — only show data for the specified academic year (e.g. 2005 = academic year 2005/6)
rows=… — max number of rows of data to include (default is 500) n.b. the summary section shows the breakdown for all rows, not just the ones included by the rows limit
The format of the XML is pretty much the same as shown in the project documentation guide, except that I've added a summary section to the output.
Notes
The API was knocked together quite quickly, so please report any bugs! Also, I can't guarentee that the API is 100% stable, so please let me know (e.g. via Twitter) if it appears to be down.
Tony Hirst has just blogged about using Greasemonkey and Yahoo Pipes to do something funky with the data
[...] – to start: if you haven't already done so, go and read @daveyp's blog post on Simple API for JISC MOSAIC Project Developer Competition data [competition announcement], because that's what we're playing [...]
[...] loans data that has been opened up as part of a developer competition running over the summer (Simple API for JISC MOSAIC Project Developer Competition data [competition [...]
[...] was going to be a bit of work. Luckily very soon after the competition was announced, Dave offered a simple API to the data which definitely looked more my kind of thing – a relatively simple XML format, with nice [...]
[...] MOSAIC data wiki and an API [...]
[...] Other possibilities of using reading list – use the ISBN to look up an Amazon style ' people who borrowed this book also borrowed that', and Dave Pattern's Mosaic API . [...]
Ooopsy — apologies for the API being down since Friday afternoon. I made a change to the Apache config and failed to spot it stopped the API from working. It's fixed now.