In order to pull data from Digital Measures (DM), a query must be sent via URL. The query will tell DM who to look up and what information to find. The who aspect can be a single faculty member, or an entire group such as the COB. The what piece describes the kind of data to pull for that particular person or group. DM will then tailor an XML document that contains the desired information. The next step is to process the data and extract it into a C# application where it can be modified in any way that we like. Here is an example of what a DM query looks like:

https://www.digitalmeasures.com/login/service/v4/SchemaData/INDIVIDUAL-A...

https://www.digitalmeasures.com/login/service/v4/SchemaData/INDIVIDUAL-A...

https://www.digitalmeasures.com/login/service/v4/SchemaData/INDIVIDUAL-A...

The above queries will target all authors within the COB (Individual-Activities-Business) and retrieve details on each publication or intellectual contribution (INTELLCONT), presentation (PRESENT), and author (PCI personal contact info). The naming scheme for these queries is designated by DM.

Our goal is to piece together citations for display on faculty bio pages. So when we process the XML, we'll need to keep track of authors, publications, and presentations. This is made easy by creating a class for each of these three groups.

  1. DMPublication: Template for itellectual contributions
  2. DMPresentation: Template for presentations.
  3. DMAuthor: Template for authors.

Think of these classes as molds or templates that will allow us to create "objects". Take the author class for example. If you look at the class above, you'll see there are four things we want to keep track of for an author. We want to know their ID, a unique identifier that every author is assigned by DM. We also want to know thier faculty bio web address. The third string, which is actually three different strings, will hold an author's first, middle, and last names. The last thing we are interested in is which department the author is associated with so we can group publications by department. When we run the PCI query against DM, we get back a list of all authors that have published under the COB. Using the author class above, we create objects for each one.