API Update: More Metadata!

This week has been real busy for the arXiv API team. We spent a lot of time introducing ourselves to the community, and it looks like there are more murmurs about us on the web (see Jacques Distler’s blog and Life on the Lattice). We love to hear that the community is excited, so keep on talking!

Amongst all the excitement, we also got a chance to make some improvements to the API. The API is now returning arXiv subject classification.

Every arXiv e-print has a primary subject classification, and can be cross-listed into secondary subject classifications. For an example, go to

http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.5276

and look for the ‘Subjects:’ line. You will see that this e-print falls into two categories: cond-mat.mes-hall and cond-mat.mtrl-sci. The primary category (in bold) for this e-print is cond-mat.mes-hall.

Now the API will return ALL arXiv categories as Atom elements. For example, these categories would be included as:

<category term="cond-mat.mes-hall" scheme="http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom"/>
<category term="cond-mat.mtrl-sci" scheme="http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom"/>

There is a new extension element in the xmlns:arxiv=”http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom” that repeats the primary category information, and is called primary_category. In this example, it looks like

<arxiv:primary_category xmlns:arxiv="http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom" term="cond-mat.mes-hall" scheme="http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom"/>

The documentation has been updated, and you can find more information in the user’s manual

In addition, all the code examples have been updated in the documentation, so you can start playing!

Links

• API User’s Manual
• Jacques Distler on the arXiv API
• Life on the Lattice on the arXiv API