[Web4lib] Re: OpenSearch, Koha, and Library Catalogs [SRW/U]

[Ryan Eby]

I have to agree that these two products aren't incompatible.  While I
haven't really done much with SRW/U I have done some with OpenSearch.
The main reason is that it is really just an extension to RSS and is
backwards compatible. This allows ease of use and adoption for people
as many are already familiar with RSS. It also lets me have one
interface for both RSS and OpenSearch.

I think it comes down to what your trying to accomplish and how much
metadata you need. If your just trying to syndicate search results
then OpenSearch is probably the way to go. If your trying to return
more metadata for a more enhanced search (metasearch, etc.) then SRW/U
is probably a must.

Ryan Eby

On 7/25/05, Ross Singer <ross.singer at library.gatech.edu> wrote:
> Mike Taylor wrote:
> 
> I think my point is that these two technologies aren't incompatible,
> and, in fact, can serve two different purposes.  I honestly believe it
> is much easier to create a "generic" opensearch client that can point at
> any opensearch server and always display the same way than it is for
> SRW/U.  This doesn't exclude SRW/U from searching across
> databases/resources/collections in the background, it also doesn't
> exclude SRU being the URL sent in an OpenSearch result set (I'm talking
> hypothetically here).  The OpenSearch server, can, in fact, be  (and in
> our case, is) an SRU client.
>