My colleagues have been talking about OpenSearch from A9. Thom Hickey reports on his new blog.
Is there a middle ground here? Something that is compatible with SRU, but closer to A9? Our Metasearch representative, Ralph LeVan thinks so and has offered to develop guidelines to make this happen. The catch is that what is being proposed, while compatible with SRU, is not SRU compliant. According to Ralph, there is some reluctance on the part of those developing SRW to embrace anything less than full compliance, but we argue that not only would the proposed simplification of SRU be a step forward from the screen-scraping that Metasearchers engage in, it is a step in the right direction, in that extending the services to full SRW compliance wouldn’t break anything. [Outgoing]
This seems to me to an example of where we should work hard to align approaches if it turns out to makes sense. The advantages of a lightweight search protocol which can return results in a variety of structured formats (RSS, RLI, …) should be clear.
