OpenSearch - draft note

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

Here is a draft note I propose to send to the OpenSearch list.  Please
comment.   Please try to comment no later than noon Friday. I would like to
post this before the end of the day Friday (I'll be away Monday and
Tuesday).

--Ray


DRAFT MESSAGE

I'm posting this note on behalf of the OASIS Search Web Service Technical
Committee.
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=search-ws

We want to ensure that our work is aligned with OpenSearch.

Among the specification we are developing are SRU and CQL version 2.0.
These are based on SRU/CQL 1.2; see http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/ and
http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/specs/cql.html.  SRU is a search/retrieve
protocol (web/xml-based successor to Z39.50) and CQL is the "Contextual
Query Language" .  Version 2.0 will represent a major revision of version
1.2.  We want to ensure that it will map into OpenSearch; we have already
added features to that end.

We invite you to look at http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/oasis.html which
is our best effort to summarize our work and its status.  Note first the
Abstract Protocol Definition  (APD)
http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/apd-V1.0.html which defines a
number of abstract request parameters and response elements.  Bindings are
developed, based on the APD.

Please note in particular that we have drafted a binding for OpenSearch,
http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/opensearch-v1.0.html . In section
2.2 you can see the mapping of abstract parameters to OpenSearch parameters,
and in 2.3 abstract response elements to OpenSearch response elements.
Note also that this document elaborates some of the concepts and semantics
of the OpenSearch spec (Draft 3) - as we have struggled to understand some
areas of the specification we have in some cases imposed our
interpretations. See for example the "model", 2.1, and also some "analysis"
provided for the response example, 2.3.  Some of our interpretations of the
spec might be based on misunderstanding and we fully intend to correct any
errors brought to our intentions.

We invite critique of this document and we also invite OpenSearch
implementors to participate in this OASIS work, to help us insure that these
two important standards play well together.