Getting Started with Fluidinfo

Getting Started with Fluidinfo

by Nicholas J. Radcliffe, Nicholas H. Tollervey
Released February 2012
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9781449331795

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Book description

Imagine a public storage system that has a place online for structured data about everything that exists—or that could exist. This book introduces Fluidinfo, a system that enables you to store information about anything, real or imaginary, in any digital form. You’ll learn how to organize and search for data, and decide who can use, modify, and extend what you’ve contributed.

This guide demonstrates Fluidinfo’s potential to create social data, with facilities that encourage users and applications to share, remix, and reuse data in ways they may not have anticipated. You’ll learn how to use tools for reading and writing data, and how to use Fluidinfo in your own applications by working with its writable API and simple query language.

  • Read and write Fluidinfo data from web applications—and reuse and build upon each other’s data
  • Discover Fluidinfo’s permissions system for tags and namespaces
  • Learn how to use Fish, the command-line tool for interacting with Fluidinfo data
  • Delve into Fluidinfo’s RESTful API, and learn how to make HTTP requests
  • Use Fluidinfo client libraries to build a simple Python utility or a JavaScript web application

Table of contents

  1. Getting Started with Fluidinfo
  2. SPECIAL OFFER: Upgrade this ebook with O’Reilly
  3. A Note Regarding Supplemental Files
  4. Preface
    1. Organization of this Book
    2. Versions
    3. Conventions Used in This Book
    4. Using Code Examples
    5. Safari® Books Online
    6. How to Contact Us
    7. Acknowledgments
  5. 1. What Is Fluidinfo?
    1. The Openly Writable World
    2. Key Concepts
      1. Objects
      2. Tags
      3. Users
      4. Permissions
      5. Queries
    3. Organizational Metaphor
      1. Like Wikipedia for Structured Data
      2. Like Delicious for Bookmarking Anything
      3. The About Tag
    4. Signing Up for a Fluidinfo Account
  6. 2. Fluidinfo from the Command Line
    1. Getting Started with the Tags, Show, and Get Commands
    2. Tagging and Untagging
    3. Specifying Objects
    4. Managing Tags and Namespaces
      1. Listing Files and Namespaces: The ls Command
      2. Removing Tags and Namespaces: The rm Command
      3. Creating Tags and Namespaces: The mkns and touch Commands
    5. The Fluidinfo Permissions System
      1. Listing Permissions on Tags and Namespaces with ls -L
      2. Setting Permissions: Simple Use of the perms Command
      3. Shortcuts for Common Permissions Cases
      4. Setting Group Permissions
    6. Extended Example: Working with Books in Fluidinfo
  7. 3. Social Data
    1. Twitter and Social Data
      1. Walled Gardens of Data
      2. Tickery: Twitter Data Only
      3. We Met At: Emerging Conventions in Twitter Data
      4. Tunkrank: Adding Value to Twitter Data
      5. A Query Like No Other
    2. O’Reilly Metadata
      1. Instant API
      2. Using the API
      3. Skillshelves: Repurposing and Augmenting O’Reilly Data
      4. A Query Like No Other
    3. Blog Mining and Emerging Conventions
      1. Boing Boing
      2. ReadWriteWeb
      3. Union Square Ventures
      4. A Query Like No Other
    4. Social Data
  8. 4. Programming with Fluidinfo
    1. Client Libraries
      1. Introducing fluidinfo.py
    2. Fluidinfo.py Fundamentals
    3. Common Tasks Using fluidinfo.py
      1. Create a New Object
      2. Tag an Object with a Value
      3. Get a Specific Value from an Object
      4. Delete a Specific Value from an Object
      5. Query for Specified Values on Matching Objects
  9. 5. Programming with FOM
    1. FOM Fundamentals
      1. Namespaces and Tags
      2. Working with Objects
      3. Searching Objects
      4. Working with Permissions
    2. Putting It All Together
  10. 6. Programming Fluidinfo with JavaScript
    1. API Functions
      1. DELETE
      2. GET
      3. HEAD
      4. POST
      5. PUT
    2. Utility Functions
      1. createObject
      2. del
      3. getObject
      4. query
      5. tag
      6. update
    3. An Example Application: The Social Bookreader
      1. Modeling Data: What Is a Book?
        1. Granularity
        2. Structure
      2. Viewing Data: The User Interface
      3. Application Logic: Putting It Together
        1. Reading books
        2. Annotating books
      4. Next Steps
  11. 7. Fluidinfo’s RESTful API
    1. Making HTTP Requests to Fluidinfo
      1. User Validation
      2. Request Headers
      3. Response Headers
      4. Encoding
    2. API Endpoints
      1. /about
      2. /namespaces
      3. /objects
      4. /permissions
      5. /tags
      6. /users
      7. /values
  12. 8. Advanced Use of the Fluidinfo Shell
    1. Permissions in Depth
    2. Setting Individual Low-Level Permissions with perms -X
    3. Generating Unix-style Long Listings with ls -l and ls -g
  13. 9. Conventions for the About Tag
    1. A Book Example
    2. The Perfect About Tag
    3. Normalization and Standardization
    4. Specificity, Ambiguity, and Language
      1. Languages
    5. Tags for Indicating Related Objects (Linking)
    6. Constructing About Tags for Common Objects
    7. The Abouttag Command
    8. Finding Fluidinfo Objects from Amazon Product Pages
    9. Generic Normalization
    10. Command Substitution
  14. A. Fluidinfo Query Language Reference
    1. Tag Presence: The has Operator
    2. Equality: The = Operator
    3. Numeric Inequality Comparisons: <, <=, >=, >
    4. Inexact Text Matching: The matches Operator
    5. Combining Queries with and, or, except, and Brackets
    6. List-Valued Tags: The contains Operator
  15. About the Authors
  16. Colophon
  17. SPECIAL OFFER: Upgrade this ebook with O’Reilly
  18. Copyright

Product information

  • Title: Getting Started with Fluidinfo
  • Author(s): Nicholas J. Radcliffe, Nicholas H. Tollervey
  • Release date: February 2012
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781449331795