[ Update - 2009.06.07: As pointed out by Todd Carpenter of NISO (see comments below) the phrase “ SRU by contrast is an initiative to update Z39.50 for the Web ” is inaccurate.

(Click image to enlarge graphic.) While the OASIS Search Web Services TC is currently working towards reconciling SRU and OpenSearch, I thought it would be useful to share here a simple graphic outlining how a search web service for structured search might be architected.

We just registered in the SRU (Search and Retrieve by URL) search registry the following components: Context Sets PRISM Context Set version 2.0 PRISM Context Set version 2.1 Schemas PRISM Aggregator Message Record Schema Version 2.0 PRISM Aggregator Message Record Schema Version 2.1 This means that an SRU (Search and Retrieve by URL) search engine that supported one of the PRISM context sets

An Overview of the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange Interoperability Framework View more Microsoft Word documents from hvdsomp. This is a very slick presentation by Herbert Van de Sompel on OAI-ORE which he’s due to give today for a workshop at the INFORUM 2009 15th Conference on Prrofessional Information Resources in Prague.

The new OAI-PMH interface to Nature.com sports one particular novelty which may well be of interest here: it makes use of the PRISM Aggregator Message. (For an announcement of this service see the post on our web publishing blog Nascent.) As a protocol for the harvesting of metadata records within a digital repository, OAI-PMH records may be expressed in a variety of different metadata formats.

Over the past two weeks we’ve focused on our OpenURL query interface with the goal being to improve its reliability. I’d like to mention some things we’ve done. We now require an OpenURL account to use this interface (see the registration page) . This account is still free, there are no fixed usage limits, and the terms of use have been greatly simplified. Resources have been re-arranged dedicating more horse-power to the OpenURL function.

OCLC has published a report (PDF) identifying some requirements for what they call a “Cooperative Identities Hub”. A quick glance through it seems to show that the use cases focus on what we are calling the “Knowledge Discovery” use cases. As I mentioned in my interview with Martin Fenner, there is also a category of “authentication” use cases that I think needs to be addressed by a contributor identifier system.

Martin Fenner continues his interest in the subject of author identifiers. He recently posted an online poll asking people some specific questions about how they would like to see an author identifier implemented. ^* The results of the poll are in and, though the sample was very small, the results are interesting.

So while doing some background reading today I realized that legal citations already widely support a form of “citation typing” in the form of “Introductory Signals“. The 10 introductory signals break down as follows… In support of an argument:    1) [no signal]. (NB that, apparently, this is increasingly deprecated.)    2) accord;    3) see;    4) see also;

I was happy to read David Shotton’s recent Learned Publishing article, Semantic Publishing: The Coming Revolution in scientific journal publishing , and see that he and his team have drafted a Citation Typing Ontology. ^* Anybody who has seen me speak at conferences knows that I often like to proselytize about the concept of the “typed link”, a notion that hypertext pioneer, Randy Trigg, discussed extensively in his

Discussions around “contributor Ids” (aka “Author ID, Researcher ID, etc.) seem to be becoming quite popular. In the interview that I pointed to in my last post, I mentioned that Crossref has been talking with a group of researchers who were very interested in creating some sort of authenticated contributor ID as a mechanism for controlling who gets trusted access to sensitive genome-wide aggregate genotype data.