CiteSeer-API: towards seamless resource location and interlinking for digital libraries.

ABSTRACTWe introduce CiteSeer-API, a public API to CiteSeer-like services. CiteSeer-API is SOAP/WSDL based and allows for easy programmatical access to all the specific functionalities offered by CiteSeer services, including full text search of documents and citations and citation-based document discovery. In order to enable operability and interlinking with arbitrary software agents and digital library systems, CiteSeer-API uses digital content signatures to create system-independent handles for the Document, Citation and Group resources of CiteSeer servers. We discuss specific functionalities of CiteSeer-API that take advantage of these handlers in order to enable seamless location of CiteSeer resources. Finally we argue that the digital signature scheme used by CiteSeer-API is well suited for the creation of machine-usable semantic descriptions of digital library services which is the key toward seamless discovery and integration of services such as CiteSeer-API. CiteSeer-API is currently showcased on CiteSeer.IST, the CiteSeer server of the School of Information Science and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University.