discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

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

Thanks to everyone who submitted comments on our SOAP interface which we
announced last week.  I am currently working on revising the SOAP API
and hope to publish updated documentation soon.

The initial version of our REST web services API is now available for
testing.  The API implements the following methods:

http://api.creativecommons.org/rest/classes
 Returns an XML document containing license class IDs and labels.

http://api.creativecommons.org/rest/license/[class_id]
 Returns an XML document describing the license fields and options for
the given class_id.

http://api.creativecommons.org/rest/license/[class_id]/issue
 Returns an XML document containing the license URL and RDF when the
answers to fields are POSTed to the URL.  Answers should be in the form
field answers, and of the following format:
 <answers>
   <field_id>value</field_id>
 </answers>

 Where the field_ids are identifiers obtained from the call to
/license/[class_id],

Sample code is available in soap-client.py, available from SourceForge
CVS (http://http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/cctools/) in the api
module. There is currently a wxPython-based sample client, which also
implements a Python wrapper class to handle the XML parsing and
manipulation (rest-wx-client.py).

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

Thanks for your help,

Nathan R. Yergler
Software Engineer
Creative Commons