Querying the CTAN Database with JSON – Author

The information about a single author can be obtained under the URL like

http://www.ctan.org/json/1.3/author/knuth

The last element in the URl is the key of the author as used by CTAN. Those keys are also listed in the list of authors.

The result is a JSON term as in the following listing:

{"key":"knuth","givenname":"Donald E.","familyname":"Knuth"}  

The entry is an object. It has several attributes:

key

This attribute contains the key of the author. This attribute is mandatory.

title

This attribute is the title of the author. It is optional and can be empty. The default is empty.

givenname

This attribute contains the given name. It is optional and can be empty.

von

This attribute is the von part of the author's name. It is usually in lower case and has values like von, van, or de. It is optional and can be empty. The default is empty.

familyname

This attribute is the family name. It is optional and can be empty.

junior

This attribute is the junior part of the author's name. It is usually an addition to the name like jr., sr., or a numeral like I, II, III, IV. It is optional and can be empty. The default is empty.

pseudonym

This attribute is the alias name to protect the privacy of an author who requests it. It is optional and can be empty. The default is empty. In case this attribute is not empty the other name constituents are not shown.

female

This attribute is the boolean indicator that the author is female. It is optional and can be empty. The default is false.

died

This attribute is the indicator that the author is deceased. It is optional and can be empty. The default is empty.

Note that the authors information does not contain the email address of the author to protect the privacy.

Names

Names are a complicated matter. We are adopting a simplification inspired by BibTeX.

Examples:

Donald E. Knuth

{ id:"...", givenname:"Donald E.", familyname:"Knuth" }

Barbara Beeton

{ id:"..." familyname:"Beeton", givenname:"Barbara", female:"true" }

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

{ id:"..." givenname:"Johann Wolfgang" von:"von" familyname:"Goethe" died:"true" }

Dr. Rainer Schöpf

{ id:"..." title:"Dr." givenname:"Rainer" familyname:"Schöpf" }

King Richard III

{ id:"..." title:"King" givenname:"Richard" jr:"III" died:"true" }

Wladimir Iljitsch Uljanow aka Lenin

{ id:"..." givenname:"Wladimir Iljitsch" familyname:"Uljanow" pseudonym:"Lenin" }

References

You can request that more information about the authors is provided. This information is the list of packages in which the author is mentioned. This is accomplished with the parameter ref . It can be set to true as in the following example:

http://www.ctan.org/json/1.3/author/knuth?ref=true

This results in an json file like in the following listing;

{"key":"knuth","givenname":"Donald E.","familyname":"Knuth","packages":["ada","cmtest","gkpmac","graphbase",…]} 

In this case an additional attribute is included.

packages

This attribute which contains the list of package ids.