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27 February 2006

panlibus: Pattern does OpenSearch in IE7 Beta

panlibus: Pattern does OpenSearch in IE7 Beta:

After my Virtual Prod about OpenSearch, Dave Pattern of the University of Huddersfield promptly delivered such an interface to his Dynix OPAC.

OpenSearch is a spec layered on top of RSS for describing how searches can be done on any database, with the results formatted in RSS in such a way that any browser supporting OpenSearch can make them available. This is going to be the default search mechanism in IE7, and it's already in Amazon's A9 service.

The OpenSearch specification is not that complicated (as specs go), and it takes advantage of a bunch of existing infrastructure that libraries and databases already have. Any time you can standardize a query interface you have the opportunity of tremendous increased usage if only because there is then that much less time you need to write the interface code and more time to look at the data.

At Mashup Camp last week people were boasting that they had 170 APIs for data and that new ones were being created all the time. I stuck my head up and said that that was way too many and we should be looking for no more than about 25 different ways to get at the sorts of information that's out there on the net. We'll just have to see how much not-invented-here there is and how much people latch on to common approaches.

Posted at 05:08 PM |

Comments

Excellent points. Most APIs (well, the read part, not the write part) are put in a query, get back a list; i.e. perfectly suited to OpenSearch. Which works just as well for Atom as for RSS, btw.

Posted by: Michael Fagan | 27 February 2006 at 07:52 PM

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