TheyWorkForYou news
July 2008

18 July 2008

API keys, and improved internal links

In order to monitor the service for abuse, help with support and maintenance, locate large volume/ commercial users to ask them to contribute to our costs, and provide users with usage statistics of their application, we're adding API keys to our API. Apologies to current API users who will be inconvenienced; the API will allow key-less calls for a short time, during which current users can get a key and update their code.

In front end news, we now locate whenever an old version of Hansard is referenced (which they do by date and column number, e.g. Official Report, 29 February 2008, column 1425) and turn the citation into a link to a search for the speeches in that column on that date. This only really became feasible when we moved server, upgraded Xapian, and added date and column number metadata (among others), allowing much more advanced and focussed searching - the advanced search form gives some other ideas. Perhaps in future we'll be able to add some crowd-sourcing game to match the reference to the exact speech, much like our video matching (nearly 80% of our archive done!). :)

Posted at 14:01:00 by Matthew | Link to this