After spending years and mucho $$$, feds have decided to recall the Global Information Locator Service (GILS) standard (according to Federal Computer Week). For those of us involved in searching via WAIS and other now decade old searching schemes (back in the day when they were new), this is not a surprise but a relief. Eliot Christian has had a very long ride on GILS (he declined to comment on the story linked above), but will now have to consider how work done for GILS might fit with W3C standards and with current searching standards used by Google and Yahoo! Could these old school GILS problems point to similar problems with the semantic web? And what does this mean for state standards based on GILS like NC GILS?
What say you old school searchers?
I think you have two options for searching right now. Either everyone put a Google box on your site if you like monopolies on information access, or no standard at all. Have we made progress?
The only true open standard for searching that I’m aware of is SRW, which is nothing more than old school search standards translated into Web Services. Some people are doing great innovative work with these “old” standards, like the Library of Texas’ federated search service.