[Taxacom] Species Pages & OpenSearch

[Roderic Page]

This is nice, but (I know, there's always a "but"), there are two parts  
to the story. The first is providing a simple means to query the  
database, which is what OpenSearch provides.

The second is the form the results take. Unfortunately, many OpenSearch  
providers serve RSS 2.0 or Atom feeds, which are very limited in the  
information they contain, and don't lend themselves to aggregation in  
the way that RDF does (i.e., RSS 1.0).

For the curious, I discuss this in more detail here:  
http://ispecies.blogspot.com/2006/12/open-search-and-nearctic- 
spider.html

If we combine OpenSearch with RSS 1.0 and some simple, agreed  
vocabularies, then I think we would be well on the way to being able to  
aggregate biodiversity data which much greater ease than at present.

Regards

Rod

On 1 Dec 2006, at 18:47, Shorthouse, David wrote:

> 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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>
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>
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>
> University of Alberta
>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
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