Religion case example for OpenSearch
by Jacob on Nov.10, 2006, under Religion
On my technical blog, I talked about aggregating search results with OpenSearch. Below is a religious case example for use of the OpenSearch technology. (You should read what I’ve written about OpenSearch before continuing to read this.)
Something I’ve been working on has been my LDSsearch.com project. LDSsearch.com is a search engine which has indexed a selection of web sites which have been identified as friendly to the LDS faith. It is good, but it fails at completely indexing all LDS content out there. However, it does provide its search results in an OpenSearch format. Now there is another site called Scripture Tag which tags verses from scriptures. I’ve talked with the developer of the site about returning the scripture tag information in an OpenSearch format. I’m also hoping that someday we can get a search engine for general conference talks which can provide its search results in an OpenSearch format.
With all these, and hopefully more, sources for topic specific information about the LDS faith, I could perform a search query for “wisdom” and the results could be all aggregated to one point. I would see websites about wisdom, scriptures which have been tagged with the word wisdom, and general conference talks which mention wisdom all together at once.
The new gospel library at LDS.org already aggregates searches by providing results from scriptures, magazines, and lessons all on one page. I hope that someday they can also provide their search data with OpenSearch, so that the data can be used in other applications and aggregated with additional content.
Related posts:
November 10th, 2006 on 3:59 am
P.S. You should also read LDSsearch.com blog posts I’ve written about how the LDSsearch.com search engine uses OpenSearch and how we then used that ability to allow you to search LDSsearch.com from A9.com.
November 10th, 2006 on 12:21 pm
[...] UPDATE: On his personal blog Jacob discusses several possibilities for OpenSearch from a religious perspective. For example, it would be great if the Church’s new Gospel Library supported OpenSearch. Categories: Mormon, Foundation, Cool Sites, Posted at 10:16 am [...]
November 11th, 2006 on 7:07 pm
How about quotes tagged with wisdom as well?
November 11th, 2006 on 8:41 pm
Connor,
You betcha. The first step is to provide RSS feeds of your tags.
November 11th, 2006 on 11:41 pm
I’ve created an opensearch page for my site, here:
http://quoty.connorboyack.com/opensearch?tag=faith. Like ldssearch.com, it also takes the ’start’ and ‘hitsPerPage’ variables. Did I do this correctly? This opensearch stuff is all new to me..
November 12th, 2006 on 1:32 am
It looks pretty good. I see that you have a couple of nutch: elements. Those aren’t part of OpenSearch and thus won’t be used, but leaving them in there won’t hurt anything. You should be able to use a regular RSS feed validator to make sure everything looks right, but my quick examination looks good.
Do you have an OpenSearch description file? The one for LDSsearch.com is at http://ldssearch.com/opensearchdesc.xml, but you can start with something more simple. See http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#OpenSearch_description_document
Once you have the description file, you can start playing around with A9.com, which will let you test it before you actually subscribe it to their directory of search sources.
November 12th, 2006 on 9:55 am
Yep, I created the file and it’s at http://quoty.connorboyack.com/opensearchdesc.xml (I used yours as an example to make it quicker :)). I wasn’t able to find where to submit my site to A9.com - can you point me in the right direction? The developers page says you can submit your site, but doesn’t have a link or anything to allow you to…?
November 12th, 2006 on 11:47 am
Nevermind, found the link to submit, but i’m getting a NullPointerException error when I submit my file, even though it’s been validated as correct XML.. I’ll have to play w/ it later.
November 12th, 2006 on 11:53 am
Sorry for all the posts (you can just delete them all since they’re somewhat irrelevant :)) but I just fixed my xml (I was missing the xmlns=”..” attribute) and have submitted it to A9. Suh-weet!