URIplay released as free/open source software
Post categories: Prototypes,ÌýServices
| 10:27 UK time, Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Hi all
RAD's really pleased to announce that we've released some recent work as free/open source software. It's a project called . The code was produced in collaboration with the 91Èȱ¬ by an indie startup called who pitched the idea to us some time ago. We've been working on this together over the last few months and are delighted that it can now be shared. The reference code release bundle is available at . It's important to note that since our reference release, there's been a lot of progress on new features (mentioned below) and development of that is taking place over at  - so go there for the full-fat code experience.
You can investigate , see the or read the and find out more about the
URIplay allows developers to access information on
media brands or programmes (from a wide range of sources) using
standard data formats and API calls. This means, for example
that if a blog post refers to a piece of content on the 91Èȱ¬ Radio site,
and the URIplay API is used, people looking at the page from outside
the UK, or outside the current rights window for that piece of content,
could be provided alternative options - be that a pay-for aggregator,
or information about when it's on next, or many more options (if they
exist - This system can't create the rights to distribute
content where the deals haven't been done!), and depends on upstream
providers to make their content available in sensible formats and
publish their URIs.
It currently works with a number of different content sources:
- Podcasts and YouTube data through the same interface
- Read data using standard RSS or RDF libraries.
- Get context from Wikipedia,
- Look items up via their iMDB links
- Include data from the live web, via Twitter search. For example, what's hot on YouTube
- Subscribe to links in iTunes (e.g., this aggregate podcast made from an OPML file of interesting stuff) and in Miro (e.g., this list of the latest YouTube videos discussed on Twitter--paste it into Miro's box titled 'Add Channel').
- Follow links to other sources of data, such as MOAT and Freebase.
It's built on the fantastic work done by the team in 91Èȱ¬ Audio and Music around /Programmes and is meant to be extendable for new uses we haven't thought of yet.
It returns RDF or RSS XML, and it's a strong follower of Web inventor 's suggestions around and
It
can operate as a federated service, allowing a number of different
URIplay instances to run on different servers - querying the correct
server for the correct information set. It doesn't store any data itself but queries its upstream data sources.
It's written in Java and we've had it running on Debian
GNU/Linux and tested/ deployed on RHEL/Centos, but should run on any
sane Java stack. A more detailed README around deployment/ real world
war stories is coming this week.
We're using URIplay in a number of our prototypes including our work on Totem/ Ubuntu, P2P-Next, and our recommendations system. We'll be going into detail about these soon.
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