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@ualberta.ca
http://canadianarachnology.webhop.net
http://arachnidforum.webhop.net
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