Very very cool. Count me in as a fan. OpenSearch is cool as hell, we're experimenting with this as well.

Are you guys looking into representing search results as an Atom feed?

Hi Gudmundur:

Thanks for the comment. Regarding your question about ATOM you will see from the OpenSearch description file at

http://www.nature.com/opensearch/opensearch.xml

or from the SRU entry point at

http://www.nature.com/opensearch/request

that we are supporting multiple media types - both XML based:

1. SRU
2. RSS
3. ATOM

and text-based:

1. JSON
2. JSONP
3. HTML

From an OpenSearch perspective you (or your user agent) would just select the ATOM template, i.e. the URL template with the associated ATOM media type. From an SRU perspective you would just submit an SRU request with an HTTP 'Accept' header indicating preferred MIME type (i.e. 'application/atom+xml'), or alternatively you could pass that MIME type explicitly in the SRU request using the SRU 2.0 parmeter 'httpAccept'.

So, yes, we do serve up ATOM as well as RSS.

For your information we also use ATOM as the basis for our JSON profile, i.e. the JSON is a fairly direct mapping of an ATOM document with some obvious changes in respect of JSON not allowing repeated object keys (so theese are mapped to single key with an array value type).

Do feel free to ask for any further information or clarification on our response types.

Cheers,

Tony