[Web4lib] Faceted navigation as metasearch

[Andrew Hankinson]

I don't have any practical experience with this topic, but it's always
been an interest of mine.

I would wonder if the OAI model of metadata harvesting would be useful
in these situations.  There's a standard set of metadata (Dublin Core,
usually), and the harvesters can be scheduled to receive metadata at a
convenient time (say, 4am), parse it and provide up-to-date (24-hour
old) pre-processed metadata to the local users.  If vendors provided
an OAI server to query for metadata, it would go a long way towards
speeding up the process of federated searching.

I'm intrigued by OpenSearch, but haven't looked into that much.  No
time like the present!

(Now, if we could just get rid of MARC and use an XML-based standard,
everything would be fine......)

On 12/30/06, Casey Bisson <cbisson at plymouth.edu> wrote:
>
>
> On Dec 30, 2006, at 7:30 PM, K.G. Schneider wrote:
>
> >> Karen, The problem with metasearch is that you're working with
> >> retrieved
> >> sets -- and with the data in different formats.
> >
> > The library-based metasearch applications have capabilities built
> > in around
> > database providers' capabilities (I almost wrote limitations...),
> > while the
>
>
> Another approach to this is to get the aggregated facet data from the
> database vendors as part of the search. If the vendor offered good
> access to the data, with a list of both results _and_ relevant facets
> (and suggested alternate searches), our metasearch apps could simply
> display that without having to do the processing.
>
> Tops on my wishlist for 2007 is better/more implementation of
> OpenSearch in library systems. OpenSearch supports returning facet
> info and suggested alternate searches, turning this into a problem of
> how to display and use the data.
> Casey Bisson
> __________________________________________
>
> Information Architect
> Plymouth State University
> Plymouth, New Hampshire
> http://oz.plymouth.edu/~cbisson/
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>
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