[Taxacom] Species Pages & OpenSearch

[Shorthouse, David]

Folks,

 

I'm curious how many institutions provide species pages as part of their web
services & if there has been any attempt to programmatically register
providers of these (i.e. akin to GBIF's UDDI for collection/observation
record providers).

 

I have alerted a few folks to this (apologies if you already received it) &
normally I don't pay any attention to commercial web applications, but I am
extremely impressed with an outfit out of Australia called "Zoom Search":
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/. Just yesterday they released a new version
that can spit out XML/RSS output as results from a conducted search, which
means this opens the door to OpenSearch aggregators. NCBI, GBIF, Discover
Life, Rod Page & his iSpecies, etc. ought to be very interested in this. The
XML output is obtained as a minor change to a query string; otherwise,
search results for in-house species pages and the like are fully
css-formatted result pages using a configurable template.

 

Cheers,

 

David P. Shorthouse

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Department of Biological Sciences

CW-403, Biological Sciences Centre

University of Alberta

Edmonton, AB   T6G 2E9

Phone: 1-780-492-3080

mailto:dps1 at ualberta.ca

http://canadianarachnology.webhop.net

http://arachnidforum.webhop.net

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