At 22:19 08-08-2003 +0100, Matthew J. Dovey wrote:

>More seriously, we are straying onto metasearch requirements territory
>here. I suspect that one of their requirements and a reason I suspect
>that might give for not considering SRU/SRW is that they do expect a
>single string to work on an arbitrary list of servers!

Surely you mean that they *don't* expect this? As far as the database
providers go, they could presumably care less.. and if the metasearch
engine builders seem unimpressed by efforts like SRW, I'm guessing it's
because they have long-since resigned to the fact that they not only have
to generate different queries across servers, in many cases they will have
to submit those queries through completely different protocols, ranging
from Z39.50 (and, thanks to us, SRW/SRU) to proprietary protocols and HTML
screen-scraping. What we're doing in ZiNG is, frankly, unlikely to change
this picture much over the next few years. The momentum we're facing is
tremendous.

Surprisingly to me, in a current, ambitious, large-scale metasearch project
we're doing which spans libraries and non-library resources, good
old-fashioned BER-encoded Z is by far the strongest common denominator,
even for the non-library databases.

--Sebastian
--
Sebastian Hammer, Index Data <http://www.indexdata.dk/>
Ph: +45 3341 0100, Fax: +45 3341 0101