Work on the web services API for the encyclopedia continues, now with tags.  Here’s a quick rundown:

You can get a list of supported tags here:

http://pedia.directededge.com/api/v1/tags/

That currently returns:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<directededge version="0.1">
  <tag>actor</tag>
  <tag>author</tag>
  <tag>book</tag>
  <tag>company</tag>
  <tag>film</tag>
  <tag>musician</tag>
</directededge>

You can then get results from article queries based on a tag, using something like this:

http://pedia.directededge.com/api/v1/article/KDE/tags/company/

Which returns:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<directededge version="0.1">
  <item id="KDE">
    <link>Trolltech</link>
    <link>Novell</link>
    <link>Hewlett-Packard Company</link>
    <link>Nokia</link>
    <link>World Wide Web Consortium</link>
    <link>Mandriva</link>
    <link>Canonical Ltd.</link>
    <link>Sirius Satellite Radio</link>
  </item>
</directededge>

You can query any article for any tag (unlike in the web interface).  Right now the results for “off topic” tags tend to be hit-or-miss.  One of the other big items on our to-do list is improving tagged results in our engine.

I’m posting incremental updates like this in the hopes that if you’re planning on using our API in a mashup that you’ll let us know what you like and don’t like before we freeze v1.

We’ve also decided on a couple of limitations for the open API that aren’t true for our commercial API (running either on customer data sets or open data sets):

• You’re limited to 10 results.
• You can only filter on one tag at a time, meaning, you can’t get ranked results for movies and music simultaneously.

We think those are pretty reasonable and still give users a fair bit of room to play for free.  If you’re interested in using our commercial API, drop us a line!  We’ve also just created an announcement list where we’ll notify folks that are signed up of important details.  You can sign up for that here.