(Fwd) ANNOUNCE: Mozilla RDF/Z39.50 Integration Project

["DBI / Christoph Albers" <albers _at__ dbi-berlin.de>]

Liebe Liste,

folgende Mitteilung moechte ich gerne zu Ihrer Information
an Sie weiterleiten.

Beste Gruesse,

Christoph Albers

------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht / Forwarded message -------
Date:      Tue, 24 Aug 1999 02:04:50 +0100 (BST)
Subject:  ANNOUNCE: Mozilla RDF / Z39.50 Integration Project
From:      Dan Brickley <Daniel.Brickley _at__ bristol.ac.uk>
To:          "Z39.50 Implementors Workshop" <Z3950IW _at__ LISTS.UFL.EDU>,
               lis-elib _at__ mailbase.ac.uk, imesh _at__ mailbase.ac.uk, rdf-dev _at__ mailbase.ac.uk,
               dc-general _at__ mailbase.ac.uk
Cc:          mozilla-rdf _at__ mozilla.org
Reply-to:  Dan Brickley <Daniel.Brickley _at__ bristol.ac.uk>

[Apologies for the broad cross post]

ANNOUNCE: Mozilla RDF / Z39.50 Integration Project

This is a short note to announce and solicit participation in the
Mozilla RDF / Z39.50 Integration project, hosted by the Mozilla
Organisation. We hope this will be of interest to all groups investing
in any combination of Z39.50, Dublin Core and RDF technologies for
the creation of resource discovery systems.

The project can loosly be characterised as an effort to incorporate for
the Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol into the next-generation
Mozilla/Netscape web browser. For more detail on the relationship between
Netscape-the-company and Mozilla-the-browser, see [1]. Copied below is
the project overview; see the project home page at [2] for more
technical details, open issues and current status. Since the Mozilla
browser makes extensive use of W3C's Resource Description Framework(RDF) 
[3] for metadata management, browser bookmarks etc., the approach we are
adopting focusses on the integration of Z39.50 search support (using
open source software from Index Data) with the RDF metadata system.

Without going into the technicalties, we hope to find a way of
integrating Z39.50 search into the browser in such a way as to have
search results show up in the user interface, quite possibly as a set of
simple Dublin Core records. 

We are at an early stage with this work. I have cross-posted this
announcement to a handful of relevant lists; I don't expect lengthy
crossposted followup threads will be widely appreciated so please direct
any detailed followup discussion to the Mozilla RDF forum for the time
being (see link from project page [2]). If you would like to track the
progress (or lack therefore) of this work, please bookmark that page.
If your project or research group is working on related issues or is
able to contribute to the effort, do get in touch!

cheers,

Dan

[1] http://www.mozilla.org/mission.html
[2] http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/z3950.html
[3] http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/
    http://www.w3.org/RDF/

(excerpted from WWW page; note: working demos not expected until mid september)
                    
Mozilla RDF / Z39.50 Integration Project
                                      
   Contacts:
   Dan Brickley (daniel.brickley _at__ bristol.ac.uk)
   Ray Denenberg Z39.50 Maintainance Agency, Library of Congress (rden _at__ loc.gov)
   Eliot Christian GILS initiative, (echristi _at__ usgs.gov)
   Sebastian Hammer Index Data (quinn _at__ indexdata.dk)
   Chris Waterson (waterson _at__ netscape.com)
   
   This is a project to investigate the integration of Z39.50 search
   capabilities with Mozilla's RDF-based information management
   environment.
   
Aims
    * Make Z39.50 data sources accessible for searching from within
      Mozilla
    * Find an RDF representation of Z39.50 attribute sets

   There are thousands of networked Z39.50 servers in existence already.
   It should be possible to identify some mechanism whereby the Mozilla
   user interface allows people to send queries to these servers and have
   the resulting records appear within the standard Mozilla
   bookmarks/sitemaps interface.
   
Z39.50 Background

   ANSI/NISO Z39.50 is a communications protocol for information
   retrieval in a client/server environment. Widely used in bibliographic
   and digital library applications, Z39.50 represents a significant body
   of experience relating to bibliographic data retrieval and the
   specification of interoperable semantics for community-specific
   metadata attribute sets. The Z39.50 Integration Project outlined here
   is intended to identify appropriate mechanisms that will allow us to
   exploit Z39.50 data sources and metadata attribute sets from within
   Mozilla's RDF-based 'Aurora' environment.
   
  [snip]

--
Daniel.Brickley _at__ bristol.ac.uk                  
Institute for Learning and Research Technology http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
University of Bristol,  Bristol BS8 1TN, UK.   phone:+44(0)117-9287096


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CHRISTOPH ALBERS, Deutsches Bibliotheksinstitut		
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