On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, Phil Barker wrote:
> 2) CEN/ISSS Work on Simple Query Interface has started
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Together with the ARIADNE consortium and the European Schoolnet, the ELENA
> consortium has successfully initiated the standardization work on a simple query
> interface for learning object repositories. The goal of this initiative, which
> is hosted by the CEN/ISSS, is to develop a common communication framework for
> exchanging queries between heterogeneous educational nodes. We consider this
> work as an important milestone for building so called "Smart Spaces for
> Learning". The first release of the specification will be announced in this
> mailing list(*).
> --
>
> More information on Elena can be found here http://www.elena-project.org/ and
> public draft 0.51 of SQI can be found at:
> http://nm.wu-wien.ac.at/e-learning/interoperability/
It seems a shame that this doesn't build on SRW, about which it says
--- cut ---
SRW takes advantage of CQL ("Common Query Language"), a powerful query
language, which is a human-readable-string query-representation. SRW has
many similarities with the specification presented in this paper. It
introduces two main methods searchRetrieveRequest and
searchRetrieveResponse, both, with quite a number of parameters. Return
schemas are determined by the target system. No listener method is
supported.
--- cut ---
but doesn't really explain why something new had to be invented.
My gut feeling is that this proposal is probably fine if all you are
interested in searching is learning object repositories - but if you
acknowledge up front that most real-world services are going to want to
search across lots of kinds of repositories, then you need standards that
are more broadly based than just e-learning.
But perhaps I'm being very unfair about it? I'd be interested in other's
comments.
Andy
--
Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell +44 1225 383933
Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/
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