Working Group Session
at January 2000 ZIG Meeting, San Antonio:

Z39.50 and the Web

January 20, 2000

Discussion Topics

1. Purpose. What purpose should Z39.50 over the web serve? Bibliographic? Resource discovery? What else?



2. Topology. What will be the predominant topological setting for Z39.50 in the web environment? Will the Z39.50/web gateway continue to predominate or will we see the evolution of Z39.50 clients in web browsers?



3. Stateness. Stateful or stateless?



4. Z39.50 Functionality. What z39.50 functionality is desired for web access?
• search/present
• scan
• sort
• duplicate detection
• access/resource control
• encapsulation
• Explain
• Extended Services
• unicode/utf-8
• what else?



5. Additional Functionality. What functionality, not currently in Z39.50 (or not easily achieved) is desired?
• Ranking (ranking component, ranking algorithm id, etc.)
• Query reformulation



6. Profiles. What profiles are necessary/relevant? Bath? ZHTTP? ZDSR? Should there be developed a single, unified profile for Z39.50/web access?
7. Application Level Issues.
• Query. Will the type-1 query continue to be the predominant Z39.50 query in the web environment, or will xml query begin to play a stronger role? Zsql? RDF Query?
• GRS-1 or XML. Will GRS-1 continue to be used as the general synax for structured data, or will xml be used instead? If xml, will grs-1 schemas be recast in xml, and will there be xml dtds or will xml schemas be used instead?
• Marc or XML. Will MARC continue to be the predominant bibliographic format or will xml be used also? In the gateway setting, will the gateway pull marc records and convert to xml to send to the browser? In the browser/client scenario, will the server send marc records or xml?
• RDF. How will rdf fit into the Z39.50/ web picture? Can we reconcile the rdf model with the Z39.50 model?



8. PDU Issues.
• Abstract Syntax. Will PDUs continue to be described in ASN.1, or will they be recast in xml?
• Encoding. Assuming ASN.1 as the abstract syntax, will BER be used for encoding or XER?



9. Transport. Will Z39.50 continue to run directly over TCP, or will it run over HTTP?






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