RE: The imprecision of Z39.50

Ashley,

thats about the size of it - being advocated by the increasing amount of cross-searching systems that are both Z39.50 and non-Z39.50 -  termed as "metasearching".  The NISO MetaSearching notes are at:
http://www.niso.org/committees/MS-report.pdf

Rob






-----Original Message-----
From: Ashley Sanders [mailto:zzaascs@irwell.mimas.ac.uk]
Sent: 08 July 2003 14:27
To: www-zig@w3.org
Subject: Re: The imprecision of Z39.50



Mike Taylor wrote:

> >    Type 2: Search type. Just 11 values defined in this -- the
> >            search types numbered 1 to 11 above.
> 
> Aha-haha!  That's very cute :-)
> 
> Unfortunately, this approach can't work for the Bath profile,

Oh yes it can!

> whose job is very much to codify and add rigour to existing practice.

You should have been at the Bath Profile meeting yesterday where
it was suggested that something like the Bath Profile was needed
that was technology independent. Someone please correct me if
I've got this wrong, but I think it went something like this:
Strip out the z39.50 specific bits of Bath and leave just the
definitions of the types of search and index browsing that real
users want to do. The resulting meta-Profile can then be used to
derive specific technology dependent profiles -- so a z39.50
version, a Web Services version, etc, etc. Rather like the
relationship between your ZOOM abstract API and the specific
language bindings of it. Rather a good idea I thought. But maybe
there were some eddies in the space-time continuum around my
chair and I heard it all differently.

> Interestingly pragmatic approach, though.

Thanks!

Ashley.
-- 
Ashley Sanders                                a.sanders@mcc.ac.uk
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Received on Tuesday, 8 July 2003 10:19:32 UTC