New functions of CiNii Books: description and contents search, displaying author name transcription, supporting JSON-LD format and cross-domain asynchronous communication by API.

The following new functions are available on CiNii Books from Oct. 11(Fri.).

1. Description and contents search

Description and table of contents which became available from "Improvement of search specifications for the CiNii Books, displaying table of contents and uniform titles (May 23, 2013) " can now be searched in the search bar in "Content Search(Beta)" tab.

Fig. 1: The results for a content search of books and journals on "informatics" -> http://ci.nii.ac.jp/books/contents?count=20&sortorder=3&contents=%E6%83%85%E5%A0%B1%E5%AD%A6&l=en

  1. Click the "Content Search(Beta)" tab.
  2. Enter the term in the search bar, and then click the search button.
  3. The search results of the books and the journals containing the specified keyword in the "title", "description" or "table of contents" are displayed. Also, if there are information of description and table of contents, it will be displayed and specified keywords are highlighted.

2. Displaying author name transcription

The author name transcription is now displayed on book & journal details page when bibliographic record has this data.

Fig. 2: Example of displaying author name transcription"Linked Data : Webをグローバルなデータ空間にする仕組み"

3. API now supports JSON-LD

JSON-LD API (Beta ver.) for CiNii Books is now available in addition to OpenSearch(RSS1.0, Atom1.0) and RDF which are already provided. JSON-LD is a specification which expresses Linked Data in JSON format and currently under development by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

This API is based on the specification as of September 10, 2013 "JSON-LD 1.0 A JSON-based Serialization for Linked Data W3C Candidate Recommendation 10 September 2013".

The query and response specification are compatible with OpenSearch and RDF. You can get JSON-LD data by specifying JSON as response format.

How to get OpenSearch response in JSON-LD format

How to get RDF response in JSON-LD format

  • Append ".json" to the end of the CiNii Books URL and send a request.
  • JSON-LD is supported by All APIs of CiNii Books RDF for "Books & Journals", "Authors" and "Libraries".
  • Query example: Request to acquire the information on the book "Linked Data : Webをグローバルなデータ空間にする仕組み" in JSON-LD format. -> http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB11534438.json

*Application consideration

  • Details page about the request and response specification of JSON-LD API(Beta ver.) is now in preparation. Thank you for your patience.
  • Please be advised that the request and response specification of "Beta ver." may be subject to change by update JSON-LD specification or user opinions.

About details of JSON-LD, see the following Page

4. API now supports cross-domain asynchronous communication

Each CiNii Books API now supports cross-domain asynchronous communication by appending "Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *" to the http response request header.