MERLOT: Federated Searches

“MERLOT Focus on: Federated Search Technologies”
Martin Konig Bastiaan

Waiting for the overview, background slides about federated searches. In a nutshell, use web services to spread search and retrieval across multiple sources.

But the three dollar (Canadian) question- will they put a URL on the screen of a MERLOT RSS feed?

emo at http://fedsearch.merlot.org/. Options to keyword search from MERLOT, EdNA, and/or SMETE

Only 10 results “so no one snags our data”. No RSS for search results. The result is not savable as a URL link (e.g. as one does in Google), e.g. a search on “geology mine” produces:
http://fedsearch.merlot.org/main/status.jsp/../hitlist.jsp

rather than:
http://fedsearch.merlot.org/main/status.jsp/../hitlist.jsp?search=geology+mine

I just asked that question, suggesting it would be more useful to share search results. They had not thought of it.

Then I asked about RSS for results. Big pause. He then said MERLOT was revealing RSS at http://rss.merlot.org/ which will have “30” specific feeds (right now only physics).

“What about RSS for search results?” Blank stare, and shrug about RSS being considered. This is fairly lame since Garry Putland demo-ed this morning a federated search including MERLOT that produced RSS for a search results. So it looks like you have to go to Australia to do search of MERLOT that produces results that are syndicat-able as RSS.

As Opus would say, “pffffffffffttt”.

Considering whether to make the federated search technologty open-source or only for members.