Structured Schedule and Course Calendar Data for Brock University
Mon Aug 20 23:42:29 2012 EDT (-0400 GMT)
As my last post about a Brock University Important Dates iCal Feed indicated, I often find myself needing Brock University information in a structured, digital format. As I’m not one to improve public information and make it private, here’s the how I made this information more fun to play with.
As we in the Centre for Pedagogical Innovation (formerly CTLET) at Brock University to update places like Contact North’s http://studyonline.ca and other reporting work, we often need this type of information, and to make it easier for a number of purpose to make use of the information as a web services.
To that end I created http://cpi.brocku.ca/services
http://cpi.brocku.ca/services is a collection of RESTful APIs that return Brock University course calendar information in a number of formats: xml, html, csv and txt. The request URLs are created in a way that respects microformats.org’s guidelines for URLs.
Along with a the course calendar information is a handy “function” I created called brock_year. brock_year returns the current course calendar year by default, or the year that corresponds with a queried UNIX time value. This is useful because the course calendar issuing year does not always match the Gregorian calendar year. For example, duration 3 of Brock University calendar year 2012 occurs in January of Gregorian year 2013! I’ve cut and pasted the PHP for that code a few times for me and others, now it’s a web services for all.
Things will be updated as time permits and need arises. Also I should note that the Brock University Registrar’s information is considered definitive, and is the most accurate and well maintained source for this information http://www.brocku.ca/registrar/guides-and-timetable .
Hope this helps someone, or inspires someone else to expose data in a number of structured formats.
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on Monday, August 20th, 2012 at 23:42 and is filed under General, self-promotion, Technology, web dev.
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