Bitzi
home of the
Bitpedia
digital media encyclopedia
About, Products, Download, Search, Browse, Discuss, BitSocieties, Help
Your Ad Here




Bitzi works
best with Bitzi-Powered Applications.
Register or Sign In 

Bitzi XML Ticket Service

RDF-compliant XML describing files in the Bitzi catalog is available from the URLs:
http://ticket.bitzi.com/rdf/»bitprint«
http://ticket.bitzi.com/rdf/»SHA1«
Where »bitprint« represents a full Bitzi bitprint (Base32 SHA1 value + '.' + Base32 TigerTree value) and »SHA1« represents just a Base32 SHA1 value. These values may, but need not be, preceded by URN labelling like "urn:bitprint:" or "urn:sha1:".

For example:

http://ticket.bitzi.com/rdf/urn:sha1:BCLD3DINKJJRGYGHIYAX7HG5HXSM3XNH
The returned XML will be a complete, raw Bitzi Ticket – all the best available summary information for the given file identifier.

Further documentation of the internal Ticket format is coming soon; browsing a few will reveal them to be helpfully self-descriptive. We have sought to conform with the Common-XML 1.0 conventions for straightforward XML, and have reused pre-existing namespaces from the W3C, Dublin Core Initiative, and MusicBrainz where appropriate.

The root element of each Ticket currently looks like: 

<rdf:RDF 
 xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
 xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
 xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
 xmlns:bz="http://bitzi.com/xmlns/2002/01/bz-core#"
 xmlns:mm="http://musicbrainz.org/mm/mm-2.0#">
Additional info about the fields that appear in our XML is available on our OpenBits Data Dump info page.

A provisional Bitzi Ticket RELAX-NG Schema is also available. This schema may still have errors and omissions; please report any problems to our Developer Discussion Forum.

If the Bitzi OpenBits Catalog does not have any information about the requested file, you will receive an empty but well-formed Ticket, containing only bookkepping fields about the Ticket's minting time, expiration time, and recommended filename as a standalone file.

As the traffic against the ticket.bitzi.com URLs increases, they may respond with unique busy, redirect, and challenge codes designed to shunt lookups to other avenues. Documentation of these special cases, and suggestions for dealing with them, is coming soon – but in the meantime, be ready to handle failed retrievals gracefully.



© 2009 The Bitzi Corporation | Policies | Company Info | In The Press | Link To Us

295,852 bitizens have contributed 15,857,863 tags about 3,192,254 files.