Advanced querying for collections

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dartar

2 months ago

I'd love to play with the Ohloh API to retrieve stats on collections (users, projects) but unfortunately the kind of functionality that I'd need is not implemented in the API yet.

Correct me if I'm wrong: currently the only fields that can be used on a query are "name" for accounts and "name or tags or desc" for projects. This dramatically limits what can be done with the API.

Ideally I would like to be able to run complex boolean queries based on any combination of account/project properties, or at least on those properties for which the API already supports sorting.

Moreover, both for projects and users, it would be very useful to have the primary language represented at collection level so as to be able to query the API for, say, Ruby projects or developers with Ruby as primary tracked language.

Advanced query support would make it possible to access the Ohloh DB in a variety of useful ways and allow developers to write new applications on top of the API. Imagine, for example, an application retrieving a list of developers who write in the same languages in which I write code and located in my neighbourhood. There's a lot of fantastic applications that could be built if Ohloh made a further effort in exposing its data.

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dartar

2 months ago

(bump) any feedback on this?

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Robin Luckey

2 months ago

Hi dartar,

I'm sorry for the lack of response; there's just a lot to keep up on around here.

There's the general feeling around here that we have a lot more data than we expose. There are a lot of examples like yours of interesting things we could display with just a little more work. We've got data about where and when individual lines of code were written -- surely there's more we can show than just a graph of lines of code.

I agree that it would be great to implement complex queries across projects and people. We'd like to expose these features in the website as well as in the API. We've discussed this often, but it has not become part of the formal feature plan yet.

It's not a lack of interesting ideas that stops progress, it's a surplus of things that absolutely need to get done to stay online and in business. :-)

IIRC, Facebook has built an interesting SQL-like query language for pulling data out of their system. I'm skeptical that we'd have the time for anything like that anytime soon, but I do think it's a fascinating glimpse at what's possible.

If we can move forward with an "advanced" project search on the web site, as many have requested here lately, we could probably also expose this through the API and get a lot of what you are looking for.

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dartar

about 1 month ago

Thanks for your note Robin. I understand there are other priorities, but consider that a fully functional API is the best way to get developers to work for you on features you don't have time/resources to implement ;)

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