CrossTech

The recently discussed (announced?) Google Knol project could make Google Scholar look like a tiny blip in the the scholarly publishing landscape.

I love the comment an authority:

"Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content."

And so I suppose this means they are assigning author identifiers....

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The OASIS Search Web Services TC has just put out the following document for public review (Nov 7- Dec 7, 2007):

Search Web Services v1.0 Discussion Document

• Editable Source: http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/DiscussionDocument.doc
• PDF: http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/DiscussionDocument.pdf
• HTML: http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/DiscussionDocument.html
  

From the OASIS announcement:

"This document: "Search Web Services Version 1.0 - Discussion Document - 2 November 2007", was prepared by the OASIS Search Web Services TC as a strawman proposal, for public review, intended to generate discussion and interest. It has no official status; it is not a Committee Draft. The specification is based on the SRU (Search Retrieve via URL) specification which can be found at http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/. It is expected that this standard, when published, will deviate from SRU. How much it will deviate cannot be predicted at this time. The fact that the SRU spec is used as a starting point for development should not be cause for concern that this might be an effort to rubberstamp or fasttrack SRU. The committee hopes to preserve the useful features of SRU, eliminate those that are not considered useful, and add features that are not in SRU but are considered useful. "

Posted by Tony Hammond at 05:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ACAP has released some documents outlining the use cases they will be testing and some proposed changes to the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) - both robots.txt and META tags. There are some very practical proposals here to improve search engine indexing. However, the only search engine publicly participating in the project is http://www.exalead.com/ (which according to Alexa attracted 0.0043% of global internet visits over the last three months). The main docs are "ACAP pilot Summary use cases being tested", "ACAP Technical Framework - Robots Exclusion Protocol - strawman proposals Part 1", "ACAP Technical Framework - Robots Exclusion Protocol - strawman proposals Part 2", "ACAP Technical Framework - Usage Definitions - draft for pilot testing".

What would cause other search engines to recognize the ACAP protocols rather than ignore them? A lot of publishers implementing this and requiring search engines to recognize it to index content could put pressure on the engines. Maybe.

Posted by Ed Pentz at 07:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Ray Denenberg's post to the SRU Listserv yesterday:

"The new SRU web site is now up: http://www.loc.gov/sru/

It is completely reorganized and reflects the version 1.2 specifications.
(It also includes version 1.1 specifications, but is oriented to version
1.2.)

...

There is an official 1.1 archive under the new site,
http://www.loc.gov/sru/sru1-1archive/. And note also, that the new spec incorporates both version 1.1 and 1.2 (anything specific to version 1.1 is annotated as such)."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 04:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OASIS has just announced a technical committee for standardising search services. This from the Call for Participation:

b. Purpose

To define Search and Retrieval Web Services, combining various current and
ongoing web service activities.

Within recent years there has been a growth in activity in the development of
web service definitions for search and retrieval applications. These include
SRU, a web service based in part on the NISO/ISO Search and Retrieval standards;
the Amazon OpenSearch, which defines a means of describing and automating search
web forms; as well as many proprietary definitions (e.g. the Google and MSN
Search APIs). There are also a number of activities for defining abstract search
APIs that can be mapped onto multiple implementations either within native code
or onto remote procedural calls and web services, such as ZOOM (Z39.50 Object
Oriented Model); SQI (Simple Query Interface), an IEEE standard developed for
searching and retrieval in the IMS (Instructional Management Systems) space; and
OSIDs (Open Service Interface Definitions from the Open Knowledge Initiative.
While abstract APIs would be out of scope, these would inform the work to
increase interoperability and compatibility.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 05:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Update: All apologies to Google. Apparently this was a problem at our end which our IT folks are currently investigating. (And I thought it was just me. :)

Just managed to get this page:

"Google Error

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.
To continue searching, please type the characters you see below:"

And my search request?

ark

(Actual query is here as argument to the continue parameter.)

Was hoping to find results related to the The ARK Persistent Identifier Scheme. Maybe I missed something but I'm not impressed.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 05:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nelson Minar has a short post on Google's Search History 'feature' and how it can be used to enhance your search experience. I guess that should be SearchULike.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 05:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)