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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------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
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Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com