Science Hack Day, Mendeley YQL Tables

It’s been a long time since my last post, I’ve mostly been busy down in London working at Mendeley and it’s gone very quickly. This has recently lead me to the Science Hack Day last weekend where I met some great people, learnt many things and hack on some YQL tables for Mendeley’s new api for their research data.

YQL is quite a cool piece of technology which basically lets you treat the web as a big SQL table, so you can effectivly join twitter to a google search, then grab some usage statistics from the Mendeley api for example.

I’ve put the Mendeley YQL tables up online here to play with in the YQL console here. With this you can do queries like :-

SELECT * FROM mendeley.search WHERE query = “information retrieval”

And then start joining our different api calls together like this :-

SELECT title, year, stats FROM mendeley.details WHERE id IN (select id from mendeley.tags(50) where tag = “genetics”) | sort (field=”year”, descending=”true”)

I’m trying to get them in the community tables in github soon so that they can be more easily used by everyone, and I don’t have to keep them up on dropbox (even how amazing that is for rapid prototyping of YQL tables).