Hi folks,
On a related matter. The ESRC have asked us to develop a method of
incorporating searches of the Regard service
<http://www.regard.ac.uk> into their new Website such that they have
complete control over display of the information. The solution I came up
with is an XML-RPC -> Z39.50 gateway.
This means that simple clients can be coded using pretty much any
programming language you want and the results can be formatted however you
please. This was a surprising simple and elegant way of solving the problem,
and an order of magnitude less complex than the architecture proposed for
the DNER although to be fair so was the problem..
There is a rather uninspiring demonstrator and associated notes at:
http://www.regard.ac.uk/regard/xml-rpc/
http://www.regard.ac.uk:8200/regard/xml-rpc/listener_notes
Please note that due to server load the response to queries will be **SLOW**
(we are awaiting delivery of a new box.)
Also if everyone hits the listener with a lot of requests then this may
cause us performance problems on the rest of the service and so I may have
to take it offline.
Server load would of course also be an issue for anyone participating in the
DNER where hardware was acquired some time ago to service the needs of
primary users only. Being hit by agregators and harvester robots plus the
increased traffic from cross searching will inevitably lead to performance
issues for service providers. This will need to be considered in the
architecture proposal and everyone should be aware that extra funding will
be needed to upgrade kit.
Cheers.
Liz Lyon wrote:
> UKOLN has recently undertaken a study into the technical options for the
> architecture of the DNER. The work was carried out by Andy Powell and Liz
> Lyon in consultation with the wider community, and although ongoing, the
> main study is now complete and a web site containing documentation and
> presentations is available at
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/ (and also at
> http://www.dner.ac.uk/architecture/).
>
> Our thanks to everyone who contributed ideas and time to the study -
> hopefully we have listed you all in the Acknowledgements.
>
> Liz Lyon
> _____________________________________________
> Dr Elizabeth Lyon
> Director
> UK Office for Library & Information Networking (UKOLN)
> University of Bath
> Bath BA2 7AY
> UK
>
> email: [log in to unmask]
> Tel: +44 (0) 1225 826580
> Fax: +44 (0) 1225 826838
> URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
> ________________________________________________
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