JISC Information Environment Architecture
Service Description Service
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Introduction
The JISC IE Service Description Service
will provide detailed technical information in machine-readable form about
JISC IE services.
The primary intention of the service is to allow portals, brokers and aggregators
to automatically determine how they should interact with content providers
and other brokers and aggregators.
The level of detail provided in the service descriptions will be protocol specific
and must be detailed enough to allow direct interaction between services.
Service descriptions will be closely related to the JISC IE collection descriptions
held in the
collection description service.
To inform the development of the JISC IE service description service, UKOLN
have commissioned a short study to investigate the issues below.
The study will be coordinated by UKOLN on behalf of the JISC Development
Programme Team.
Scope of study
The study should cover the following areas:
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The metadata schema(s) needed to describe JISC IE services.
The schemas should be sufficient to describe HTML/HTTP,
Z39.50, OAI Harvesting Protocol and RSS/HTTP services.
The study should consider extensibility of service description to other
protocols and standards.
It is anticipated that the study will give primary consideration to
Explain-Lite,
WSDL
and the metadata schema used within the Identify response
in the
OAI Harvesting Protocol.
It is anticipated that any proposed solution will be based on XML.
-
The (persistent) identification of services so that they can be
referred to in other metadata (for example within collection descriptions).
-
The protocol(s) used to exchange service descriptions between the
service description service and other JISC IE service components (portals,
brokers and aggregators).
It is anticipated that the study will give primary consideration to
UDDI
and the
OAI Harvesting Protocol.
The study should be mindful of the need for some services to query the
service description service dynamically in real-time while others will
operate in batch mode, caching service descriptions locally or using them
to create local configuration files on a regular, automated basis.
-
Any business and service provision issues,
including ownership of the service
descriptions, the maintenance of information held in the service
description service and the relationship between the service description service
and the
collection description service.
-
The availability of software tools for interacting with the service
description service and processing descriptions.
Timescales
It is anticipated that the study will be completed by the end of November 2001,
in accordance with the
JISC IE architecture development plan.