[Tdwg-guid] [Taxacom] Species Pages & OpenSearch

[Markus Döring]

Rod,

using RSS feeds as search results is a good thing I believe. But from
what I know Atom at least (I think RSS2 too) can carry any payload. Atom
defines a <content> element to hold any structured data. Even
multimedia, see podcasts. IBM has a nice overview and shows examples
using FOAF:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-atom10.html

There surely is the debate of RDF vs XML schema left which I dont want
to get into here again. But to me especially atom looks promising for
structured data.

Google is using Atom a lot nowadays and provide access to many of their
services, for example the GData API:
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/protocol.html

Atom also defines ways to create, edit or delete resources by the way. 

Another thing to mention is that full text searches are nice, but
sometimes you might want to search on structured data. For example on
coordinates. Or you only want to search for accepted names and not find
taxa whose description mentions other taxa, e.g. "looks a bit like XYZ".
Google has dealt with that in parts at least in their GData API. you can
restrict the search on some specific properties, they call them
predicates I think.


wished I had time to explore this more.
cheers,
Markus





On Sat, 2006-12-02 at 16:32 +0000, Roderic Page wrote:
> This is nice, but (I know, there's always a "but"), there are two parts  
> to the story. The first is providing a simple means to query the  
> database, which is what OpenSearch provides.
> 
> The second is the form the results take. Unfortunately, many OpenSearch  
> providers serve RSS 2.0 or Atom feeds, which are very limited in the  
> information they contain, and don't lend themselves to aggregation in  
> the way that RDF does (i.e., RSS 1.0).
> 
> For the curious, I discuss this in more detail here:  
> http://ispecies.blogspot.com/2006/12/open-search-and-nearctic- 
> spider.html
> 
> If we combine OpenSearch with RSS 1.0 and some simple, agreed  
> vocabularies, then I think we would be well on the way to being able to  
> aggregate biodiversity data which much greater ease than at present.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Rod
> 
> On 1 Dec 2006, at 18:47, Shorthouse, David wrote:
> 
> > Folks,
> >
> >
> >
> > I'm curious how many institutions provide species pages as part of  
> > their web
> > services & if there has been any attempt to programmatically register
> > providers of these (i.e. akin to GBIF's UDDI for collection/observation
> > record providers).
> >
> >
> >
> > I have alerted a few folks to this (apologies if you already received  
> > it) &
> > normally I don't pay any attention to commercial web applications, but  
> > I am
> > extremely impressed with an outfit out of Australia called "Zoom  
> > Search":
> > http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/. Just yesterday they released a new  
> > version
> > that can spit out XML/RSS output as results from a conducted search,  
> > which
> > means this opens the door to OpenSearch aggregators. NCBI, GBIF,  
> > Discover
> > Life, Rod Page & his iSpecies, etc. ought to be very interested in  
> > this. The
> > XML output is obtained as a minor change to a query string; otherwise,
> > search results for in-house species pages and the like are fully
> > css-formatted result pages using a configurable template.
> >
> >
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> >
> >
> > David P. Shorthouse
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Department of Biological Sciences
> >
> > CW-403, Biological Sciences Centre
> >
> > University of Alberta
> >
> > Edmonton, AB   T6G 2E9
> >
> > Phone: 1-780-492-3080
> >
> > mailto:dps1 at ualberta.ca
> >
> > http://canadianarachnology.webhop.net
> >
> > http://arachnidforum.webhop.net
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
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> >
> >
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
> ----------------------------------------
> Professor Roderic D. M. Page
> Editor, Systematic Biology
> DEEB, IBLS
> Graham Kerr Building
> University of Glasgow
> Glasgow G12 8QP
> United Kingdom
> 
> Phone:    +44 141 330 4778
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> email:    r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
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> 
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> 
> 
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