Biblioscape User Community

gotta suggestion for version 7...although I expect that at this stage, you are trying to clean up and lock down the code, not add new features. However, this whole area is exploding so I think it is worthwhile throwing up for discussion.

It would be great if Biblioscape could tie into some of the new web services that are now being seen with the new AJAX oriented Web 2.0 world. An example of this would be an application like LibraryThing - this is a simple tool that combines the searchable databases of amazon.com and the Library of Congress so that you can simply search for a book and if is is on either of these bibliographic services, then the data is extracted into the very simple LibraryThing online database. The data is scraped from amazon and LoCong because those groups have opted to allow Web 2.0 style access to their databases.

 The result of this is that you have the merging of data from different sources in ways that are very flexible. There are many other examples of this. for example, one realtor service is combining the web services of Google Maps, with Flickr, so that they can post photos of houses along with their location. Then you can simply search by location and take a look at the houses before you have to go driving around. There is a similar service integrating CraigsList I believe that allows you to combine pricing data.

 There are many other similar examples out there. These combinations of uses are often quite imaginative, going beyond what the original service providers imagined.

Biblioscape could be both a service and an aggregator of such data. The data sharing is largely done via XML and RSS so the coding involved should remain quite simple for external users. I don't know how much work it would involve for Paul and his team. But XML data exchange is now dominating the web - definitely worth looking into, I would have thought.