OASIS Search Web Services Technical Committee and OpenSearch

[Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress]

This note is posted 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/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.

http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/oasis.html  summarizes 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 all errors brought to our notice.

We invite review, critique, and discussion 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.

Ray Denenberg
Library of Congress
Co-Chair OASIS Search Web Service Technical Committee

[DeWitt Clinton]

Hi Ray,

Thanks so much for forwarding this.  At a quick glance this looks like fantastic work and exciting progress.  I look forward to digging in deeper, and I can't wait to see more implementations spanning the SRU / OpenSearch spectrum.

And likewise, as we're just working on OpenSearch Draft 4 now, if the OASIS TC sees places we should clarify or expand OpenSearch to facilitate the interop, please don't hesitate to share.  I know there are plenty of things we can clean up on the OpenSearch side, and the insight of the TC will be invaluable in highlighting places we can make improvements.  (If there were any misunderstandings, it's quite likely a bug in the OpenSearch spec, not the other way around.)

Thanks again!

-DeWitt