Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

This post is hardly timely, but I wanted to gather together some resources that I have been using for REST (Representational State Transfer) and HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State).  It seems like everyone claims to be RESTful, but mentioning HATEOAS is frequently met with silence.  Of course, these terms come from Roy Fielding 's PhD dissertation , but I won't claim that it is very readable (it is not the nature of dissertations to be readable...).  Fortunately he's provided more readable blog posts about REST and HATEOAS . At the risk of aggressively over-simplifying things, REST = "URIs are nouns, not verbs" and HATEOAS = "follow your nose". "Follow your nose" simply means that when a client dereferences a URI, the entity that is returned is responsible for providing a set of links that allows the user agent to transition to the next state.  This standard procedure in HTML: you follow links to guide you through an o...

Glue Conference 2012  took place at the Omni Interlocken Hotel Bloomfield, CO on May 23 and 24th. Gluecon is an information packed developer conference that focuses on cloud, mobile, APIs, big data, and most importantly, developers. Some of the topics included NoSQL, node.js, HTML5, backend-as-a-service, cloud management and security, cloud storage, Hadoop, DevOps, mobile app development, and cloud platforms. I attended the conference with sponsorship (full ride) from  FullContact .  These guys were unbelievably gracious and showed me a great time while I was out there.  I came in contact with them when  Bart Lorang , CEO of FullContact contacted me over e-mail and wanted to setup a time to talk with him and his engineering team about a  paper  I had  published  at a  KDD'11 workshop .  After meeting with the guys and talking shop, I found out that they are solving the same real world problems (at world scale) that I...

I recently conducted an experiment on tags provided from the bookmarking site delicious.com . The goal was to obtain a decent sized sample set of URIs and tags that users have used to annotate the URIs. The website provides a recent tool that automatically redirects to a somewhat random URI that was recently annotated by some Delicious user. By parsing the HTTP headers I was able to grab the redirect URI and therefore build a corpus of 5000 unique URIs. The URI for the tool is http://www.delicious.com/recent/?random=1 . As the second step I needed to obtain the corresponding tags for each URI. I tried to be a good programmer and used the Delicious API to query for the tags instead of parsing the web interface. In order to use the API (v1) you need an account with Delicious/Yahoo. The request for https://username:pwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/suggest?url=http://www.google.com/ for example returns an XML formated response with the top five popular tags: search google search eng...