Federated Search Convention

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

Motivation

Overall Architecture

Reuse of Existing Standards

Modification of Standards

Restriction Conventions

Response Formats

Although OpenSearch allows a number of different formats (HTML, RSS, Atom), the ESIP Federated Search convention is to return an Atom response. This is (mostly) intelligible to browser-based newsreaders (the lowest common denominator) while providing a relatively rich structure for parsing as well as accommodating domain-specific extensions.

Time in Atom Response

Time is specified only for the query, not the response in the draft Time extension to OpenSearch. The ESIP Federated Search convention is to represent Time of datasets or granules as the following:

  • The namespace is defined as xmlns:time="http://a9.com/-/opensearch/extensions/time/1.0/"
  • Time is represented as XML elements "start" and "stop" (following the draft for the Query), e.g.:
    • <time:start>YYYY-MM-DDTHH:SS:MMZ</time:start>
    • <time:stop>YYYY-MM-DDTHH:SS:MMZ</time:stop>
  • By convention, time is in Universal (Zulu) time, using the format YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS[.SSS]Z. Fractional seconds are optional.

Extensions

Implementation Guidelines

Appendices

Sample Server Implementation

Sample Client Implementation