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

>The DNER architecture talks about distinct 'collection description' and
'service description' services
>
>http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/collection-descrip
tion/
>http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/service-descriptio
n/
>
>though I would expect these two things to be delivered via a single
'DNER directory' (or 'DNER registry') shared service.
>
>My understanding of UDDI is that the 'businessService' and
'bindingTemplate' entities provide the same distinction - though,
clearly, the terminology is very different.

More or less, the problem is that there is not a simple mapping between
collections and services. A collection may span multiple collections, or
vice versa. UDDI has a model of a BusinessEntity which has multiple
BusinessServices which in turn has multiple BindingTemplates.

The BusinessEntity describes the organisation (Name, identifiers,
classification etc) and the user can search on that.

BusinessService the particular service offered by the organisation (e.g.
library catalogue, medical database, Geospatial database etc.)

BindingTemplate indicates how to access the service (a library catalogue
may have multiple bindingTemplates - Z39.50, web, ILL, NCIP).

In terms of Z39.50 support (and I can draft a white paper for the next
ZIG if anyone is interested), my view is that the bindingTemplate for
Z39.50 would contain the tModel (well-known identifer cf OID) for
Z39.50, optionally a tModel for a profile (e.g. Bath), basic connection
details (server:port/databasename) and optionally a link to an XML
document giving a more detailed description of the Z39.50 server (e.g.
ExplainLite, Robert Saunderson's ExplainML etc.)

For anyone who is really interested, an initial comparison of the DNER
architecture and the 'Web services' architecture is available at

  http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/ws/notes/

I'm currently working on a study of different service level descriptions
for the DNER architecture which will hopefully be publically available
in the next few weeks. The draft includes a functional crosswalk between
various schemas including UDDI, Explain, ExplainLite etc.

Matthew

Received on Monday, 25 February 2002 08:40:08 UTC