Move external API requests to client

[mrwunderbar666]

Make requests to external APIs before the user sends data to Meteor. Analogous to the "Magic Button", the automatic import of data should happen while the user makes an entry.

• Social Media related APIs only relevant for news sources
• Entries with scientific identifier: Dataset, Archive, Tool, Scientific Publication, Author
• All other entries can load from wikidata: Journalistic Brand, Political Party, Organization, Government, Parliament, Person, Channel, Country, Subnational, Multinational/Supranational, Language, File Type, Programming Language, Meta Variable, Concept Variable, Operation

[mrwunderbar666]

Meteor API provides some endpoints for APIs that require an API key. Meteor acts as a middle man that forward the clients requests to the actual API:

• Twitter
• CRAN
• DOI
• Instagram
• Telegram
• vk (vkontakte)
• Website statistics (e.g., website views)

For the APIs below, this step is not necessary, the front-end client can make those requests directly. The advantage is that there is less load on the Meteor server and the work is distributed among the clients.

Wikidata API

Get List of Suggestions:

Endpoint

https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php

Query

https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbsearchentities&search=<query string>&format=json&language=en

Query Parameters as python dict:

params = {'action': 'wbsearchentities',
              'search': query, 
              'format': 'json', 
              'language': 'en'}

Get wikidata entry for a given Wikidata ID

Endpoint

https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php

Query

https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbgetentities&ids=<wikidataid>&format=json&language=en

Query Parameters as python dict:

params = {'action': 'wbgetentities', 
              'languages': 'en',
              'ids': wikidataid, 
              'format': 'json'}

PyPI

get metadata on a PyPI project

Already implemented in JavaScript: static/js/external_apis.js

Endpoint

https://pypi.org/pypi/<packagename>/json

GitHub

get metadata on a github repository

Already implemented in JavaScript: static/js/external_apis.js

##Endpoint

https://api.github.com/repos/<repository>

OpenAlex

Dynamically look up authors by name

Already implemented in Javascript, where it performs two requests at the same time. First request goes to OpenAlex, at the same time a request goes to Meteor that checks whether the Author is already present in the database: templates/helpers/_tomselect.html

Endpoint

https://api.openalex.org/autocomplete/authors

Query

• q: string (author name)
• author_hint=institution (what author detail should be pre-loaded to disambiguate authors)
• mailto:[email protected] (that openalex can track our requests and put us in the "friendly requests" category