Just Say NO to Anything Mandatory

["LeVan,Ralph" <levan@oclc.org>]

Here’s what I like about OpenSearch: just about any site that supports searching via HTTP Get can declare itself compliant.  I want to be able to say the same thing about SRU.

 

It’s true that some OpenSearch sites don’t deliver much functionality; they use local query grammars and return peculiar records if not just plain HTML.  But, there is the capability of low-level interoperability.  We know how to get a search to them.  We don’t know what that search will do and we don’t know how to interpret the results, but we did do the search.  For human users, doing the search is sometimes enough.

 

Based on that minimal interoperability, they have been able to demonstrate federated searching capabilities that we can only dream about.

 

The level of interoperability is decided by business needs.

 

In the standards world, specific business needs are encapsulated in profiles, not standards.  For profiles to work well, they need to have considerable latitude in use of the base standards.  Mandatory features tie the hands of profile developers.  We saw this while trying to help the NISO Metasearch Committee figure out how to use SRU.  We ended up having to say that we were a non-compliant implementation of SRU because NISO couldn’t accept all the SRU mandatories.

 

So, back to OpenSearch.  The only mandatory they have is that you have a description record.  If you don’t have that, then you aren’t doing OpenSearch.  I think we need to adopt the same philosophy: Explain records are the only mandatory in SRU.  Everything else is subject to profiling; response formats, query languages, record schemas.

 

Now, this does mean that there will be sites claiming to be SRU compliant with whom you can’t do anything particularly useful.  But all that really means is that either you don’t have a business need to search them or they don’t have a business need to be useful to you.  If either of those does become true, then the minimal SRU implementation that they have will be better than what they had before they claimed SRU compliance.

 

Ralph