Technical Discussion on Next Generation of Z39.50
下一代Z39.50技术探讨

With the intellectual contributions accumulated over nearly 20 years, Z39.50 is already a mature standard for information retrieval. But there is still few known beyond the library realm. Complexity and utilization of unpopular transport protocol are the main barriers to popularize the standard. In order to develop a more popular standard, some of the ZIG members initiate a group of projects to recast Z39.50, the plan is called ZING stand for Z39.50-International: Next Generation. SRW is one of the projects, defining Z39.50 as a Web service. SRW preserves merits of classic Z39.50, discards those aspects no longer useful or meaningful and simplify many Z39.50 features. By lowering the barriers to implementation, SRW is more attractive. This article totally introduces SRW specifications, and discusses SRW features along with classic Z39.50.