Re: [Koha-zebra] Koha & zebra (continuing to try to understand...)

[Sebastian Hammer]

At 16:21 08-08-2005 +0200, Paul POULAIN wrote:

> Last question on this topic : zoom is claimed as something like a part of 
> zing.
> zing being an international project, that could become a NISO standard or 
> something like this.
> zoom is an indexdata baby it seems. what kind of -official- relations is 
> there between zoom & zing ?

ZOOM was a typical collaborative project within the Z39.50 community, much 
as SRW was. It had folks from several countries participating, including 
Mike Taylor, before he started working with us. At Index Data, we put a lot 
of effort into it because some of us believed that simpler APIs were a 
better solution to the supposed difficulty of implementing Z39.50 than a 
whole new protocol (some would say the jury is still out on that question). 
We released one of the first ZOOM implementations (the C-based YAZ/ZOOM), 
and it has been used by a lot other implementors to build bindings for 
other languages, but not all of them That makes some sense since YAZ is by 
far the most popular Z39.50 toolkit out there, being used by around 
two-thirds of implementations. The YAZ/ZOOM implementation was also the 
first (and so far the only one) to support both Z39.50, SRU, and SRW under 
the same API, to allow people to migrate gracefully.

So, it's not in any way an Index Data baby, even though we have probably 
put a fairly big fingerprint on it. But we have been extremely heavily 
involved in the development of SRW/SRU as well, as well as several other 
Z39.50 profiles.

--Sebastian
--
Sebastian Hammer, Index Data, www.indexdata.com
Direct phone: (603) 209-6853 Fax: (603) 357-1813