Web service and API documentation « West Midlands Regional Observatory

Screenshot representing website sources included in our search service We have a new search service on this website, powered by Exalead. As well as providing more relevant search results for content on this website, the search service signposts visitors to information on other regional organisations' sites.

The first version of the search service, released in August 2009, includes results from these sources:

This website — this includes the Resource Catalogue, containing almost 4,000 entries relating to policy, data, statistics, maps and websites.
Our Observations blog
Advantage West Midlands' resource library and events
Reports, datasets and presentations by Learning and Skills Council West Midlands. We've also indexed these regional LSC documents, which were previously available through readingroom.lsc.gov.uk.

The aim is to build a high quality search index of content relevant to policy makers and data users in the West Midlands.

Opening up the search index

This search service can be accessed and used by other organisations.

We'd like to encourage you to make use of this search service in your own website or other applications. Please do experiment and let us know what you think.

Access the web service API

The search functions are exposed as a Web Service.

Search requests for the service should be POSTed to the following URL:

http://search.wmro.org/xibis

The WSDL for the web service is accessible at the following URL:

http://search.wmro.org/xibis?wsdl=com.exalead.search.wsdl

There's an HTML search interface for testing purposes at:

http://search.wmro.org/wmro

Documentation for developers

Please see the search front-end API: XML v10 guide (PDF, 1.33mb) for details on accessing and using the web service API.

Please see the query language guide (PDF, 241kb) for details on building queries for the Exalead search engine, including combining the query fragments shown below with additional query terms.

Query	Repository
corporate/tree:"Top/Source/Advantage West Midlands"	http://www.advantagewm.co.uk
corporate/tree:"Top/Source/wmro.org"	http://www.wmro.org
corporate/tree:"Top/Source/Observations"	http://wmro.wordpress.com
corporate/tree:"Top/Source/Learning and Skills Council"	http://readingroom.lsc.gov.uk/lsc/WestMidlands

What's next?

We're working to increase the range of sources indexed in our search service.

The next stage involves indexing publications, datasets and maps produced by the sub-regional observatories:

Longer-term, we're looking at how to open up datasets and research publications on the West Midlands local authority sites.

We're also hoping that this web service API can be used as data source in Digital Birmingham's work on timely information for citizens project.

Feedback and suggestions

Please do try out the web service in your own website or applications. It'd be great to learn how the service is being used, experimentally or otherwise.

You can add comments and share links on the blog or contact gavin.wray@wmro.org.

Search front-end API: XML v10 guide (PDF, 1.33mb) for details on accessing and using the web service API.

Query language guide (PDF, 241kb) for details of building queries for the Exalead search engine.

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