[Cross-posted on the A9 Developer Blog.]
Dr. Robert Sanderson, senior editor and co-creator of the SRU search standard that is widely used throughout the library and information science communities, was kind enough to drop by the A9.comoffices in Palo Alto, CA. In fact, he did more than casually stop in -- Rob visited all the way from the University of Liverpool during a trip to the States. We were fortunate enough to have Rob for nearly an entire day, not a minute of which went to waste.
Rob and I were both pleased to find that we see eye-to-eye on nearly everything we discussed. We both view SRU and OpenSearch as complementary, not competing, technologies. The SRU (née Z39.50) community has long been tackling some of the toughest problems in search syndication, and they have done a commendable job at working out many of the intricacies of integrating and exposing diverse and distributed collections of rich data. The OpenSearch philosophy has always been to leverage other formats when possible, and the incorporation of SRU and CQL elements into OpenSearch via extensions will help create a smooth gradient connecting the two technologies.
We see many opportunities for collaboration going forward. To start, we hope to foster ongoing dialog between the OpenSearch and SRU communities. And on the technical side, there are several obvious ways in which the two formats can interoperate. For example, the OpenSearch Query Syntax could incorporate elements of CQL to perform more structured searches -- a thorny challenge that benefits from reusing prior efforts. On the response side, OpenSearch queries can be used to fetch structured SRU result sets. We even discussed ways to use a simple XSLT to convert SRU explain records into OpenSearch Description documents and SRU result sets into OpenSearch Responses on the fly. This will be particularly useful in integrating SRU-enabled resources directly into the growing number of OpenSearch-aware clients. And as SRU continues to make headway on tough problems, such as sorting, the OpenSearch community will likely want to follow their lead.
I believe that this is just the first step along a path that will ultimately benefit both search providers and searchers alike. Expect to hear a lot more over the months to come about ways in which SRU can be leveraged by OpenSearch users and vice-versa.
Many thanks to Rob for taking the initiative and the time to bring both the technology and the people behind the technology together. Not only is Rob one of the world's leading experts on search syndication, he is a very nice and personable guy -- just the type you want to collaborate with!