How to Tag Books in FluidDB¶

Tagging a Book¶

If you have fdb.py already, the basic idea is just that to rate Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with a 10, you type:

fdb tag -a "book:alices adventures in wonderland (lewis carroll)" rating=10

Here

• fdb is an alias for ‘python fdb.py'
• tag is the fdb command to tag something
• -a says that I’m going to specify the item I want to tag through its about tag (which will be the next argument).
• "book:alices adventures in wonderland (lewis carroll)" is the about tag of the object corresponding to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland using previously discussed conventions. (See section below (The About Tags) for the about tags for the Guardian 1000 books.)
• rating is shorthand for (in my case) /njr/rating, which is fdb‘s way of referring to what FluidDB itself calls njr/rating. (I lost the battle for leading slash inside Fluidinfo, but it lives on in fdb.py.)

If you want to check you have the right object first and then verify that you successfully tagged it, a full interaction might be:

$ fdb tags -a "book:alices adventures in wonderland (lewis carroll)"
Object with about="book:alices adventures in wonderland (lewis carroll)":
/objects/03c8ce35-aa5e-4b58-b3ab-ddda55642b15
  /miro/class = "record"
  /fluiddb/about = "book:alices adventures in wonderland (lewis carroll)"
  /miro/books/surname = "Carroll"
  /miro/books/title = "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
  /miro/books/forename = "Lewis"
  /miro/books/guardian-1000 = True
  /miro/books/year = 1865
  /miro/books/author = "Lewis Carroll"
$ fdb tag -a "book:alices adventures in wonderland (lewis carroll)" rating=10
$ fdb tags -a "book:alices adventures in wonderland (lewis carroll)"
Object with about="book:alices adventures in wonderland (lewis carroll)":
/objects/03c8ce35-aa5e-4b58-b3ab-ddda55642b15
  /miro/class = "record"
  /fluiddb/about = "book:alices adventures in wonderland (lewis carroll)"
  /miro/books/surname = "Carroll"
  /miro/books/title = "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
  /njr/rating = 10
  /miro/books/forename = "Lewis"
  /miro/books/guardian-1000 = True
  /miro/books/year = 1865
  /miro/books/author = "Lewis Carroll"

Another tip is that if you don’t want to look at my list below, you can search on books to find their about tags using fdb. For example:

$ fdb show -q 'miro/books/surname = "Carroll"' /about
2 objects matched
Object 8cd6fd0a-40e1-4889-ac3f-2b3dbb6f861d:
  /fluiddb/about = "book:through the looking glass and what alice found there (lewis carroll)"
Object 03c8ce35-aa5e-4b58-b3ab-ddda55642b15:
  /fluiddb/about = "book:alices adventures in wonderland (lewis carroll)"

You can see the tags all the books have in the previous post and see the query language that FluidDB supports at on the FluidDB Query Language page. Unfortunately, at the moment, text matching is exact and case sensitive, so looking at the table below or working out the noramlized about tag (which uses the book-1 convention) is probably easier.

Installing and Configuring fdb¶

If you don’t have it already and would like it, you can grab fdb.py from fdb.py and place it somewhere suitable. (You’ll probably want to rename the directory from fdb.py to fdb; sorry about that; it was my first use of github and I’m not sure there’s a way for me to rename the project directory now it’s up there.) If you’re using an earlier version of python than 2.6, you’ll need simplejson.py as well.

You then need to create a two-line file in your home directory with your FluidDB username on the first line and your FluidDB password on the second line. On Unix, this file is .fluidDBcredentials and on Windows it is fluidDBcredentials.ini.

Optionally then create an alias fdb for python /path/to/fdb.py. In bash you do this with

alias fdb='python /home/martha/fdb/fdb.py

if your home directory is '/home/martha and you stuck the directory you downloaded from github in your home directory and renamed it to remove the .py extension.

And that’s it. You could run its tests by typing

fdb

and you should get a line of 14 dots and then an OK of some sort.

Now you should be good to tag.

The About Tags¶

Here are the about tags: