Sdu Uitgevers - Sdu Web Services
Sdu Uitgevers hired Lunatech to design and develop a way to unlock publications for use in their customers' IT infrastructure. The main goals were easy integration and full flexibility for customers. The result is Sdu WebServices (SWS).
SWS is a REST-based web service hosted by Sdu Uitgevers that allows (third-party) client-applications to access the content of most core publications delivered by Sdu Uitgevers.
This allows Sdu customers’ web sites to integrate with the same data collections that power popular applications such as OpMaat and its related products such as JARonline and Officiële Bekendmakingen. Content includes the Official Publications, Dutch legislation (from wetten.nl), European legislation, various types of jurisprudence, news and other commentary. More content collections are added regularly.
SWS can be used as a mechanism for pull-based data delivery, as well as a source of directly syndicated content. Using a well-documented RESTful API, client applications can query for publications and incorporate an HTML representation of the content directly on their web pages. Alternatively, the content can be accessed in XML format, allowing custom processing for inclusion in the customer’s own content repository, among other things.
Conceptually, SWS provides two major services.
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Search - a query API supports extended searches through the various collections SWS offers on both the full document contents and its metadata. Search results are returned in the well-known and widely supported Atom syndication format, which additional functionality offered by the OpenSearch extension.
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Content retrieval - SWS provides an XML based representation of the publications in its collections, as well as a powerful viewer application that clients can customise for optimal integration into their own webpages. The XML output for all types of content is well-defined in RelaxNG schema files, and continuously checked for quality.
To make integration as easy as possible, Lunatech designed SWS to make full use of open standards. This, combined with extensive developer documentation, makes that SWS provides a solid base for any application that uses Sdu publications as a source for content.