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3rd party tools for SPIRES

APIs, Mashups, etc.

I want to use some other tools

Many people have written useful tools to help people use SPIRES. When we know of the tool, we'll provide a link to it, and offer to house the downloadable code (if appropriate) to preserve it. Remember though, that these are 3rd party apps, we don't take responsibility for any of them! The following projects are known (and linked if available):

If you know of tools like the above, let us know at spires@slac.stanford.edu so that we can provide links.

I have written/want to write 3rd party tools

SPIRES is happy to have people write useful code to access SPIRES data in other ways. If possible we'd like to be able to provide a permanaent home for such code and/or link to a place where it is available. Tools along the lines of the above are most welcome. If you are writing such tools you may want to contact us at spires@slac.stanford.edu so that we can provide advice.You might also look at the considerations below (which are not exhaustive, nor even guaranteed to be up to date.)

Rough guidelines for 3rd party tools

Not exhaustive, nor even guaranteed to be up to date.

Robot restrictions
We block robot harvests because it puts a large load on our servers: If you download large amounts of data rapid fire and/or indiscriminantly follow links, your IP will be blocked. If your tool involves making many (more than 10s) searches in a row, think of a better way, or build in a delay between requests and use our secondary server. SPIRES is an old system, and can't handle the rapid fire requests that modern systems might.
Use our secondary server
If you must make automated requests for your service, you might also try appending &server=sunspi5 to your URLs. This server is used for robot harvests, and some testing. The data is updated from the real server nightly, and it occasionally has new (read broken) functionality before the real server does. However, if you hit this server hard, our interactive users won't notice, and you'll have less chance of getting blocked (you still need to follow the rules above, though).
Understand our URLs
The only API we have (so far) is our URL syntax. Playing around on the website is enough to learn the basics of the URL structure:BaseURL/dbname/format?search&option=value
BaseURL
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find
dbname
hep or other database you want to search (abstracts, hepnames, etc)
format
www the name of the format you want to see the results in. For automated apps, you might try:
  • xmlpublic
  • rss
  • wwwbriefbibtex
search
Define the search either as
  • rawcmd=url encoded search from search box
  • field=value&field=valuethis will result in anding the various conditions
options
options include
server
selects secondary server (sunspi5)
format
unneeded (redundant with the format part of the url)
skipskips the first N results
sequence
performs an ascii sort on the element listed, append (d) to the element name to sort descending
Examples
find papers by author books in date 2007, sorted by eprint number in xml
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/xmlpublic?a=brooks&date=2007&sequence=eprint(d)
find papers by babar collaboration in arxiv hep-ex, using the secondary server, skipping the first 100 results
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/xmlpublic?rawcmd=find+cn+babar+and+parx+hep-ex&skip=100&server=sunspi5
Use XMLPublic format
This format is selectable via the url, but not on the webpages. There is no schema for this format (yet), however, it is a reasonable selection of elements presented in easy machine readable XML. No elements will ever be removed from this format, however they may be added without notice, so any parser should be prepared to find (and ignore) new things. Note that multiple SPIRES values usually occur mulitply in the XML, not concatenated in one XML element. Some things that are usually singly occurring, may occur more than once occasionally. This XML format isn't perfect, but it is better than most other options. If there is an element you want to see here, let us know. If there is a fundamental problem with the xml format, let us know that too.

SPIRES HEP was a joint project of SLAC, DESY & FNAL as well as the worldwide HEP community.
It was superseeded by INSPIRE

Last Updated: 04/07/2009

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