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

Mike Tayloe,

Can't you try to elaborate why the most of this stuff can't be solved simply
using the already existing Explain Facility as the list on page 32 of the
standard seems to cover most of these aspects?


Regards,

Henrik Dahl

-----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
Fra: www-zig-request@w3.org [mailto:www-zig-request@w3.org]På vegne af
Mike Taylor
Sendt: Friday, February 22, 2002 12:48 PM
Til: quinn@INDEXDATA.DK
Cc: www-zig@w3.org
Emne: 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?

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Received on Friday, 22 February 2002 07:40:14 UTC