For this past week, our group met for 2 hours from 1:00 – 3:00 on Sunday. We talked about our user research, as well as API implementation.
My Work
Database/API Research and Development
- I researched further into using the MusicBrainz API, and developed a functional search field that displays artist names and their unique IDs through the use of Node.js (https://nodejs.org/en/).
- I researched into the APIs we will need to use for Omni, and found that the last.fm API (https://www.last.fm/api) will be what we use to gather related artists information for each artist.
- I researched and found that we can use Node.js and Cheerio.js (https://cheerio.js.org/) to web scrape AllMusic(https://www.allmusic.com/) to gather information of artists who have influenced or have been influenced by each individual artist.
- Node.js and Cheerio.js Web Scraping: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-scrape-websites-with-node-js-and-cheerio/
- I did research on Neo4j (https://neo4j.com/) and understand that in order for us to display data, we need to connect all of the APIs and have them produce one dynamic JSON file. This file will be fed to Neo4j, which will display artists with their relations, as well as their relations’ relations, and so on.
In the Future
- The files for the search functionality of the MusicBrainz API are not on our website, as we need to host the JSON using Node.js on a separate server. We will be figuring that out this week, and will have a working example of a search function next class.
- I can start building out the HTML files for Omni this week.
