discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

["Nathan R. Yergler" <nathan AT yergler.net>]

The initial version of our SOAP API for licensing is now available.  The 
SOAP API has the following goals:

* Provide a web services interface to the CC licensing engine
* Allow 3rd party developers to easily integrate CC licensing into their 
applications, regardless of UI

The API is rooted at http://api.creativecommons.org/soap, and defines 
the following methods:

licenses()
  Returns a list of license class identifiers (currently standard, 
publicdomain; gpl, lgpl, recombo will be added)

fields(license)
  Returns a list of field identifiers for a particular license class; 
fields are values which must be supplied in order to issue a license

fieldDetail(license, field_id, lang='en')
  Returns a sequence of two-tuples which form a detail mapping for the 
particular field.  Keys include id, label, description and type.

fieldEnum(license, field_id, lang='en')
  For fields with type=='enum', returns a mapping of id/label pairs

getLicense(license, answers)
  Returns an XML document containing the license URL and license RDF; 
license is the license class ID and answers is a mapping (dictionary) 
with field identifiers as the keys.

Sample code is available in soap-client.py, available from SourceForge 
CVS (http://http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/cctools/) in the api 
module.

The following questions still need to be answered:

* How to handle work information, which should be integrated into the 
returned license RDF (always add the keys to the field list?  seperate 
function to get the work info fields and return them in an additional, 
optional parameter to getLicense?)
* Exceptions are currently poorly defined and hence relatively useless

Note that the API may (and probably will) change in the future as we 
receive feedback and developers begin using the API.  We will be using 
the API internally at CC for our ccTag application.  We expect this 
"real world" usage experience will reveal possible faults in the current 
design.  Your suggestions, comments and questions are welcome.

We will also be developing a more REST-ful API, which should be 
available for testing shortly, as well.

Thanks for your help,

Nathan R. Yergler
Software Engineer
Creative Commons