The Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read¶
I wanted to create a few objects that would begin to show some other aspects of FluidDB.
Some may remember that in January The Guardian ran a series of articles entitled 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. They published the list in themed sections, which made a lot of sense for the paper, but which made it surprisingly hard to see what the 1,000 were, so I spent a while building a digital version of the list which I blogged about and published here. (Ironically, they then did the same thing, but my work wasn’t entirely wasted, because at least I ended up with nice, clean, structured, electronic version of their list.
But . . .
Wouldn’t it be great if people could stick ratings on those 1,000 novels, or indicate which ones they’ve read, and also augment the list with novels they think should have been on there. And wouldn’t it be insanely great (in that strangely familiar phrase) if you could then find out things like
- which novels your friends have read and rated highly that you haven’t read
- which of your friends seem to like the same novels as you
- who of your non-friends like the same novels as you
- which novels have the highest ratings from users.
This is exactly the kind of thing FluidDB was built for.
So, I’ve made a start by creating FluidDB objects for some [1] of the novels.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to FluidDB¶
In order to load information into FluidDB in a useful way, we need to decide how we want to represent it. FluidDB is fantastically relaxed about this, and it is not necessary for everyone to agree. But at the same time, for users to share data meaningfully, and even for a single user to be able to find information systematically, fixing a structure is really useful.
This is what I am using so far.
In principle, it seems to me that the ISBN number is the natural way to identify a book (despite some limitations), so I’ve chosen that as the about tag (even though they’re painful for me to look up).
In a perfect world, t tags in grey would ideally have some namespace with more authority than njr (ideally isbn.org:), and in time, that may come, quite possibly using the very same object (10e4673d-daec-4904-bf9b-dd13ed88a5d9). But for now, I’ve stuck the basic metadata in my namespace (njr), and that should be enough to get things rolling. These tag were put on programmatically using a few lines of python.
The social tag, of course, is the black one—njr/rating = 9. Unlike the others, which were generated automatically, I put that one on myself, by hand. There are lots of ways of doing this, but I used FDB, with the command
$ fdb tag -av isbn:978-0330258647 rating=9
Tagged object with about="isbn:978-0330258647" with rating = 9
So: 10 down 990 to go. I will add the rest as soon as I can find a reasonable way of getting their ISBN numbers.
Tag Conventions¶
While it is fundamental to FluidDB that each user and application can make their own choices, I believe good conventions are useful and will nurture the growth of FluidDB. (Terry refers to my desire for conventions as my fascist librarian tendencies, but I’m sure he means it kindly.) I will maintain my personal suggested conventions on this blog on a post I’ll make soon. The first ones will be these:
The About Tag¶
- Books: I suggest a primary convention that matches about="isbn:978-0330258647". [2] This is, the four lower case letter ‘isbn’, followed by a colon, followed by the 13-digit ISBN number.
- Books without an ISBN number: I am going to use about=”book:Name of Book/Author” for now, but that’s not very precise. (Maybe eventually FLuidDB ID’s will replace ISBN numbers.)
Other Tags¶
- Ratings: username/rating. Mostly because Terry Jones (the father of FluidDB) has effectively promulgated this with his every description of FluidDB, I suggest ratings on a scale of 0 (worst) to 10 (best). Feel free to use decimals if 11 ratings aren’t enough. Obviously, anyone can go higher (or lower) if they want, but when I’m calculating means and things, I’ll ignore out-of-bounds values.
The Guardian 10 Novels Everyone Must Read¶
As noted before, I’ve currenlty only added objects for the first ten. This is so tiny, I thought I might as well show the FDB output illustrating what’s there. If anyone does have access, do tag these with your rating, or a has_read tag or whatever (as if you need my permission!).
At the time of writing, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has three ratings; but I bet that increases really fast.
fdb show -q 'has njr/guardian-1000' /about title publication-year author-forename author-surname guardian-1000
10 objects matched
Object edfaaf70-b9b5-42f1-ad4c-30601b70a2ac:
/fluiddb/about = "isbn:978-0330258647"
/njr/title = "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
/njr/publication-year = 1979
/njr/author-forename = "Douglas"
/njr/author-surname = "Adams"
/njr/guardian-1000 = 1
Object 9d49f0b5-fb0b-49c8-b4fc-d82eb35d90e1:
/fluiddb/about = "isbn:978-1569470039"
/njr/title = "Silver Stallion"
/njr/publication-year = 1990
/njr/author-forename = "Junghyo"
/njr/author-surname = "Ahn"
/njr/guardian-1000 = 1
Object 1be19311-1f81-4f70-ba7a-4075d9b06b4d:
/fluiddb/about = "isbn:978-9774246036"
/njr/title = "al-Bab al-Maftouh"
/njr/publication-year = 1960
/njr/author-forename = "Latifa"
/njr/author-surname = "al-Zayyat"
/njr/guardian-1000 = 1
Object f0130f4f-2bc2-4ea4-8e52-d6d4922969a2:
/fluiddb/about = "isbn:978-0701206048"
/njr/title = "Death of a Hero"
/njr/publication-year = 1929
/njr/author-forename = "Richard"
/njr/author-surname = "Aldington"
/njr/guardian-1000 = 1
Object e65b1540-1fe4-46b5-b14d-da32ae592dfe:
/fluiddb/about = "isbn:978-0141188539"
/njr/title = "The Face of Another"
/njr/publication-year = 1964
/njr/author-forename = "Kobo"
/njr/author-surname = "Abe"
/njr/guardian-1000 = 1
Object 9cdfb63a-38e2-4c27-a739-5107ec24d151:
/fluiddb/about = "isbn:978-1857989984"
/njr/title = "Non-Stop"
/njr/publication-year = 1958
/njr/author-forename = "Brian W"
/njr/author-surname = "Aldiss"
/njr/guardian-1000 = 1
Object 14371df6-73d9-43e0-96e5-2008e852d67f:
/fluiddb/about = "isbn:978-0140621198"
/njr/title = "Little Women"
/njr/publication-year = 1868
/njr/author-forename = "Louisa May"
/njr/author-surname = "Alcott"
/njr/guardian-1000 = 1
Object 97401884-3590-4c22-b9dc-0cd2744270eb:
/fluiddb/about = "isbn:978-1841955612"
/njr/title = "The Man with the Golden Arm"
/njr/publication-year = 1949
/njr/author-forename = "Nelson"
/njr/author-surname = "Algren"
/njr/guardian-1000 = 1
Object 4a96c86b-1117-4c93-a815-1494c13fc2cf:
/fluiddb/about = "isbn:978-0141186900"
/njr/title = "Anthills of the Savannah"
/njr/publication-year = 1987
/njr/author-forename = "Chinua"
/njr/author-surname = "Achebe"
/njr/guardian-1000 = 1
Object f95a950e-1b1a-425d-b4ac-b8fc82c99cb3:
/fluiddb/about = "isbn:978-0141023380"
/njr/title = "Things Fall Apart"
/njr/publication-year = 1958
/njr/author-forename = "Chinua"
/njr/author-surname = "Achebe"
/njr/guardian-1000 = 1
| [1] | OK, only ten so far, but there’s a reason. Doing them all would be really easy if I knew a good way of looking up an ISBN number programmatically. If anyone knows one, please let me know (by leaving a comment, or any other way). Otherwise I’ll have to resort to screen-scaping, which is completely doable, but dull and requires manual intervention when it goes wrong. |
| [2] | When I say the about tag and write about="...", this is shorthand for fluidbdb/about. This tag is special in that it is unique (only one object can ever exist with a given value of the about tag), and immutable. This is a basic property of FluidDB, and means that when a rating is attached to the object with about="isbn:978-0330258647", we can be confident that the object will forever more be about that ISBN number. |