Mashup Guide » Chapter 14

Zotero REST API: early developments

raymond.yee — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:58:59 +0000

Readers of my book know that I'm an avid user of social bookmarking and online bibliographic systems. As a big fan of Zotero ("a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources"), I have been looking for ways to further integrate Zotero (both the client and the web front end) into my workflows. Specifically, I would like to experiment with integrating Zotero into my teaching this semester, specifically to help my students and I share references.

I've played with scripting Zotero from within the web browser using Chickenfoot. However, a fully fleshed out Zotero REST API will, I think, be even helpful in tying Zotero to other applications. There is a Zotero REST API under development, though it is currently limited and not well publicized.

The best publicly available documentation of the API as it stands that I know of is Jeremy Boggs' code phpZotero. Reading it taught me how to make some basic calls.

(Note: I currently have two separate Zotero accounts: a personal one (rdhyee) and one for my course (mixingandremixinginfo). Ideally, I'd rather manage only one account but have two because, from what I understand, there is no fine-grained privacy control that would let me keep some references private while leaving most public. Moreover, it seems that the REST API can read only public items for now -- so I'll be applying it to mixingandremixinginfo for now. )

Let me write out what you can do with the API to get started.

Create a key at Zotero | Settings > Feeds/API (Though I've used a key, I don't see any indication of key usage in my panel -- is this a bug?)
Go to the Zotero privacy tab to check "Publish Entire Library" and "Publish Notes" to make the items (and optionally notes) visible to your API key.

Figure out the userID for the account. You can do so but doing a HTTP GET on
http://www.zotero.org/api/users/{username} e.g.,
http://www.zotero.org/api/users/mixingandremixinginfo -- see



    mixingandremixinginfo
    
        Zotero
        http://zotero.org
    
    http://zotero.org/users/119961
    2010-01-26T22:43:38-05:00
    2010-01-26T22:46:11-05:00
    
    
    
        mixingandremixinginfo
        
            
            This is a public account associated with the Mixing and Remixing Information course at the UC Berkeley School of Information
]]>

and then parse out for the id element (e.g., 119961)

Now to get items and collections, note that the base URL for the API ishttps://api.zotero.org/
and that you can use two
parameters: username, apiKey in
curl -v -k -X GET "https://api.zotero.org/users/119961/items?username={username}&apiKey={apiKey}"
to return publicly visible items.
You can get data about a specific item (e.g.,http://www.zotero.org/mixingandremixinginfo/items/102472156)with
curl -v -k -X GET "https://api.zotero.org/users/{userid}/items/{itemid}?username={username}&apiKey={apiKey}"

e.g., curl -v -k -X GET "https://api.zotero.org/users/119961/item/102472156?username=mixingandremixinginfo&apiKey={apiKey}"
Jeremy's phpCode hints at other things you can read from the API, including user collections and their items, that I've not tried accessing. However doing so should be straightforward.

Don't consider what I've written here as definitive by any means since I don't know of any publicly available official documentation. I'm eager to see the further development of the API, including the ability to access more data (about users, groups, etc) and the ability to write to Zotero servers.

Comments welcome!

delicious: the name changed, but has the API?

raymond.yee — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:40:39 +0000

I'm looking forward to having the chance to teach my "Mixing and Remixing information" course for the fourth time In January 2009. Since I plan to use my book on mashups as one of the primary texts, I'm going to have to update it. Even though the book was published in February, a fair amount has changed in the world of mashups. As a consequence, I plan, over the next three months before class starts, is to document some of those changes.

Let me start with something that should be straightforward. I wrote about delicious in Chapter 14 of my mashup book, a chapter about social bookmarking. Since the book was published, delicious underwent a change of name -- from http://del.icio.us to http://delicious.com.

In updating my book, I will have to make note this name change and any consequences. My hope is that all the old URLs would continue to work. Indeed, that is my experience during some casual testing. For instance, the URL

http://del.icio.us/url/53113b15b14c90292a02c24b55c316e5

is redirected to

http://delicious.com/url/53113b15b14c90292a02c24b55c316e5

as one would expect.

Curiously though, the URLs involved in the delicious API are still based on the old domain name -- according to the current documentation. Hence, all the URLs that look like

curl -u USER:PASSWORD https://api.del.icio.us/v1/tags/get

in my book are still correct.

After not had an opportunity to look at whether there are changes in the API that don't result from the name change -- that examination will have to come later.

Notelets for 2007.09.25

raymond.yee — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:16:12 +0000

I was going to try Google Presentation, the new Powerpoint-like subsystem of Google Docs, until I learned that it doesn't export presentations to Powerpoint or OpenDocument. (See Can I download a presentation to my local computer?.) Now, I might create my PPT or OpenDocument presentation and then upload it to see how good the importing facility is.

There is a new YouTube API based on GData, but there is still upload and write-capabilities: YouTube API Blog: We hear you - we know that upload and other write capabilities are wanted by the community. These features are what we're focusing on next. There is a PHP-based library that lets you do YouTube uploading: PHPTube - YouTube API for Video Upload & Download » nonsmokingarea.com.

One specific questions I have had about tags is how stable is the tagging for a given photo. I think that Cloudalicious - Watching Tag Clouds Over Time does a pretty good job at showing me that there is quick convergence. That's a rough take on what it shows....

New chapters posted: Seeking readers!

raymond.yee — Wed, 02 May 2007 17:20:27 +0000

I posted today first drafts of 5 more chapters for my book. Take a look -- I'd love to get some feedback on these drafts. (Send me email at raymondyee AT mashupguide DOT net.):

Chapter 3: "Tagging and Folksonomies." (2007-05-02 07:58:41)

Chapter 4: "RSS and Atom and syndication; integration with news readers" (2007-04-24 17:52:20)

Chapter 5: "Integration with Weblogs and Wikis" (2007-05-02 08:08:41)

Chapter 8: "Learning AJAX/Javascript widgets and their APIs" (2007-04-06)

Chapter 14: "Social Bookmarking and bibliographic systems" (2007-05-02 08:33:09)

Exisiting pieces to draw on on social bookmarks for Chapter 14

raymond.yee — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:00:10 +0000

If I weren't sick with a cold, I'd be energetically plowing away on Chapter 14 on the topic of social bookmarks. I'm trying to get through a first pass of the chapter this afternoon, which is likely to be way too optimistic. Fortunately, I am drawing from some work that I've already assembled:

first of all, what I had already written in my book outline for Chapter 14, which runs about a page.
my notes from my Moleskine notebook on March 30, 2007. (I find that writing by hand in my notebook to be extremely productive, which has surprised me.)
notes from my wiki on the topic from a year ago (I will have figure what has changed since last year.)
some ideas from ~brett Brett O'Connor's book del.icio.us Mashups, which from what I can see has lots of good ideas about what you can do with social bookmarks, including, of course, del.icio.us