ZIG Meeting

12/6/2000

Library of Congress

Profiles

Notes provided primarily by Les Wibberley.

Profile Overview -- Bill Moen

Interoperability
these slides will be put out on the ZIG web site
profiles are a solution path for improving interoperability

represents community consensus on requirements
identifies Z39.50 specs to support those requirements
aids in purchasing decisions
provides specs for vendors

plethora of Z39.50 profiles

library application profiles
other community profiles: GILS, CIMI, Geo
application support : Zthes

Bath profile

spec for library applications and resource discovery
3 functional areas defined:

basic bib search and retrieval
bib holdings search an retrieval
cross domain search and retrieval

several conformance levels for each area

level 0: 4 searches for basic bib search
level 1: 15 additional searches
above apples to basic searching

All done within the context of bib-1 attribute set

Z39.50 can't solve all the interoperability problems

now looking at standard indexing of local systems
profiles can help address search and retrieval problems
profiles specify exact combinations and values of attributes for standard queries

Bath is core spec, for other profiles to be based on

NISO has started US national Z39.50 profile

Bath may be a compliant subset of the US national profile
issue of founding national standard based on an international profile, which could be shifting and evolving?

National profile will focus on libraries

cross catalog searching and holdings information interchange
compatible superset of Bath for functional areas

respond to national requirements

later, may address A&I database searching, community information

indexing guidance

candidate set of items to index, and how they relate to MARC
need common indexing practices to achieve semantic interoperability
focus on indexing bibliographic data

funding from museum and library services grant to establish testbed for interoperability

OCLC, SIRSI, BookWhere, etc. are participating
demonstration > operational testbed
components include content, technical, reference implementation, procedure. organizational
testbed of Texas or Bath or national profiles
OCLC providing 400,000 records as content to test with
SIRSI will provide unicorn system and Zserver, BookWhere provide client
each server will be able to test their servers with the 400K test set of content
will have a published set of test cases
will establish an advisory group for this effort, open process

International Profile developments

Speaker: Poul Henrik Jørgensen

Bath profile

international profile
profile structure and requirements are used as base for other profiles
UNIMARC, unicode and XML support are important to international acceptance
Bath includes unicode support?
Bath uses utf-8 encoding of unicode as character set; Poul would have preferred 2-byte unicode utf-16

ONE-2 profile

Bath is subset of ONE2 profile

no continuing relationship between Bath and ONE-2
an ONE2 compliant server is Bath compliant

supports additional Z39.50 facilities beyond Bath

canadian Z39/ill profile
Australian union catalog profile for update

less demanding in certain areas:

XML not required at basic level
permits MARC holdings at basic level

concentrates on server requirements
servers may select substitutes of missing attributes
scope: allow a number of utilities to provide a service, no assumption about the clients

National Profiles

CENL (committee of european national libraries) have adopted Bath as their own
danZIG (Danish National Profile) goes beyond Bath, but supports Bath as subset
ICCU (italian national Union Catalogue) and other European Union Catalogue systems are early supporters of Bath

already has server up and running by ICCU

Developments - Bath

current Bath issues should be resolved

since other efforts are based on the Bath profile
if things are changed, could create problems

XML holdings search and retrieval

not clear how to search holdings data yet

common ISO 2709 MARC XML schema

to represent MARC records in XML

additional functions, e.g., Item Order, ILL, Circulation, Update

would be nice to profile this in Bath

object RPC API specifications would be nice

for future development
with language bindings or abstract? No specific ideas yet
Joe: Z39.50 does define an abstract API which is object oriented, even though it doesn't use object terms

ISO ILL, Circulation, EDI

Elliot Christian

WAIS was the lightest weight Z39.50

most common protocol in use within the us govt. for providing access to govt. data
per study by govt. recently

GILS

defines server behavior only
GILS limits options, and requires them
builds on WAIS, adopts bib-1, Geo profile built on GILS
Bio. adds taxonomy, to GILS
these folks don't have patience to go to ZIG meetings, but need the profiles
perhaps move toward UDDI model to allow interoperability

community interested in interoperability, not just library
profiles for information search an discovery
need to co-exist with other protocols
national information infrastructures use Z39.50 to accommodate libraries, not for technical reasons
on schedule to do v3 of GILS profile during 2001

will address XML

input encouraged

was dealing with Ultraseek in context of FirstGov

was using Inktomi, acquired Ultraseek

use proprietary protocol for linking search engines

want to include Z390.50/GILs profile in there to meld two companies

this will be a lightweight implementation

have just barely the GILS required attributes