OASIS SWS TC Work in 300 words

["Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress" <rden@loc.gov>]

I've drafted the following current-description of our work (for  someone who
is including coverage of our work in an article he is writing).   Let me
know if you have comments or suggestions.



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The OASIS Search Web Services Technical Committee has been working steadily
but quietly for several months and will soon release a set of draft
documents, including an Abstract Protocol Definition providing the framework
for the definition of "Application Protocol Bindings". Examples of these
bindings are SRU 1.2, SRU 2.0, and openSearch.



 A binding may be "static" or "dynamic" - a human-readable document
(essentially a profile), or a machine-readable file describing a server, the
description provided  according to a description language that the committee
is also developing.



There is also a third binding type, an "intermediate" binding, which takes
the form of a static binding but in turn binds to one or more dynamic
bindings. SRU 1.2 and SRU 2.0 are static bindings. openSearch is an
intermediate binding.



The premise behind dynamic bindings is that any server, even one that
existed prior to development of the standard, need only to provide a dynamic
binding, that is, a self-description. It need make no other changes in order
to be accessible. A client will be able to access any server that provides a
description, if only it implements the capability to read the description
file and interpret the description and based on that description to
formulate a request (including a query) and interpret the response.



 The committee will initially produce two bindings: SRU 1.2 (compatible with
the current SRU 1.2 specification (http://www.loc.gov/sru/),  and openSearch
(Compatible with
http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1/Draft_3)  These two
will be a straightforward rendering of the two existing specifications.
The committee will follow with a third binding, SRU 2.0, which will
introduce new features into SRU.   The committee will also initially produce
a draft CQL 1.2, compatible with
http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/specs/cql.html, and will follow later with
CQL 2.0, which will introduce new features into CQL.