Re: Z39.50 on the web (and in print)

> Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 14:30:28 +0100
> From: Sebastian Hammer <quinn@indexdata.dk>
>
> One concrete piece of criticism is the lack of an automatic way to
> discover Z39.50 hosts, which I'll pass on to the ZIG. It might be a
> good idea to think of some protocol-level way to access databases of
> targets -- such as Z39.50, LDAP, or even "something XML".

Hmmm.  (I notice that this seems to be my initial response to most
issues these days :-)

Philosophically, what use is access to a list of Z39.50 servers?  What
can you do with them apart from pick one at random and connect to it?
How would that be any more useful than (say) a list of web sites?

What's needed is (of course) some metadata concerning each Z39.50
server that tells the potential user _what_ is there (e.g. what
application domain it serves, how many records it has) as well as
_how_ it's accessed (attributes to use in searches, etc.)

That sounds to me like a job for what we Z39.50 types call a
"profile", but which no doubt has a different name out there in the
wider world -- maybe an RDF schema or something like that?

 _/|_	 _______________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor   <mike@miketaylor.org.uk>   www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Welcome to Mousebat, Follicle, Goosecreature, Ampersand,
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	 Monty Python.

Received on Friday, 22 February 2002 06:47:46 UTC