Open XML API for O'Reilly Metadata

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In addition to Bookworm, O'Reilly Labs now includes an RDF-based API into all of O'Reilly's books:

Most publishers are familiar with the ONIX standard for exchanging metadata about books among trading partners. Anyone who's actually spent time working with ONIX knows that its syntax is abstruse at best. While ONIX does use XML, there are more modern, more general, and more immediately comprehensible standards out there, particularly for the basic details like "author," "title," and "edition." One of those standards is RDF, or "Resource Description Framework." This experimental O'Reilly Product Metadata Interface (OPMI) exposes RDF for all of O'Reilly's titles, organized by ISBN.

If anyone onsite (or otherwise) puts anything interesting together with the data, we'll be happy to feature it here on the TOC Blog, just let us know in the comments.