Finding doap projects with YubNub

I was writing an opensearch plug-in for doapstore.org to allow searching projects directly from Firefox or IE7 search box, when I remembered yubnub.org, which already have such a plug-in. YubNub allows anyone to create command lines for the web, eg. typing "gim rdf" will search Google images for "rdf".

So rather than creating a plug-in for doapstore, I created a YubNub command, simply called "doap". It works as follow:

  • doap foo will search all projects with a name (doap:name) or description (doap:shortdesc or doap:description) containing foof;
  • doap name=foo will search by name only;
  • doap desc=foo will search by description (both long and short);
  • doap lang=foo will search by programming language (doap:programming-language);
  • doap host=foo will search by hostname (i.e. project URI)

The other advantage of YubNub is that it can be used not only as a search engine for your favourite browser, but also has various frontends, as Tiger widgets or command line scripts fro shell. Really useful !

NB: I also thaught as a generic SPARQL command for YubNub that would query different endpoints as Danny Ayers suggested and return a single set of results thanks to a SPARQL dispatcher but did not write anything about it.