technical notes - opensearch

[Jeremy Cothran]

Hi all,

Just a quick reference to opensearch http://www.opensearch.org/Home

Would be interested to see more usage of this type of common, open web-accessible search interface to existing and ongoing metadata or other application development.  Haven't had a chance to experiment with or implement these, but will be interested to see if toolkits and frameworks provide more of these types of discovery/access features by default in the future.  The authors include representatives from Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM.

Thanks

Jeremy

OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results.

Why use OpenSearch?

The web is a big place, and search engines that crawl the surface of the web are picking up only a small fraction of the great content that is out there. Moreover, some of the richest and most interesting content can not even be crawled and indexed by one search engine or navigated by one relevancy algorithm alone.

Different types of content require different types of search engines. The best search engine for a particular type of content is frequently the search engine written by the people that know the content the best.

OpenSearch helps search engines and search clients communicate by introducing a common set of formats to perform search requests and syndicate search results.

http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#Examples

see also http://www.slideshare.net/skansa/beyond-open-access-open-data-web-services-and-semantics-the-open-context-data-publication-system-for-archaeology-presentation