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some news, and a project idea




the news:

1) The good folks at D-Lib (www.dlib.org) found the site and it looks like
they'll have a blurb in the next issue later this month.  We like hype...

2) I checked with scoop from freshmeat.net, who said that hosting an
appindex category for Library software shouldn't be a problem.  It might
make sense to avoid rebuilding what freshmeat already does so well --
announcement of apps, revisions, and how to get to source code.  Perhaps
oss4lib should really focus on the communications (e.g. threaded
discussion) between project developers and users, broad discussion, and
hosting project pages where they don't exist already.  What do you think? 

3) For early February, it's pretty darn sunny in New Haven.  We like
sunshine too...


the idea:

URL constructors:  you've seen 'em... maybe you've written some... let's
pool them together.  What's a URL constructor?  When an online resource
uses a well-known syntax for constructing urls to get to specific pieces
of that resource (say, for instance, full text of specific articles at an
ejournal site), a url constructor takes information about that piece
(for an article, perhaps the issn, volume, and page) and returns the url
which will get that piece (article).

Why are they useful?  In DubMed, we use url constructors for two purposes: 
one, for taking the search strategies a user sets up visually and
constructing an Entrez (Pubmed) url that executes the query; two, for
taking specific information about an article and constructing a url that
retrieves that article.  See URLBuilder, IdealQueryBuilder, and
SpringerQueryBuilder for (java) code examples (follow
http://dub.med.yale.edu/dubmed/docs/howitworks.html to the source code).

These are small objects that do very specific things.  They should
basically be interchangeable, so we could define a language-independent 
interface.  We are starting to use Ovid Jumpstart here, and it would be
nice to have a JumpstartQueryBuilder to drop into DubMed...  my guess is
that one of you has already written one.  Or that there's already a
standard interface out there.

Send pointers to code, or thoughts, etc., and we can start a page listing
them all by vendor/resource and language, then hammer out the interface.


  -Dan


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