| LOT RDS Software Administration Guide | ||
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| Prev | Chapter 5. Integration of Non-Z39.50 Databases | |
Databases available only by way of human-oriented web-site interfaces raise significant integration problems. Our generic solution to this problem is our open source Z39.50-to-Web gateway system, Zpoint.
Like zHITSgate, Zpoint uses the SimpleServer module to provide the Z39.50 server portion of its functionality. Unlike zHITSgate, however, a single back-end cannot in general be used to access multiple databases, as every web-site is different. Accordingly, two separate Zpoint back-ends were created - both fairly substantial pieces of engineering - for the two Web-based databases that the RDS currently supports. Each back-end encapsulates knowledge about how queries must be formulated for the web-site it handles, how the site requires sessions to be initialised (to obtain session-IDs, cookies, etc.), how to pick apart the returned human-readable HTML, etc.
Zpoint supports the databases described in the following sections:
Vendor: STAT!Ref
Z39.50 database name: statref
This back-end searches the STAT!Ref web-site at http://online.statref.com/. The first search of a session is slow because two initialisation requests have to made before the web-site recognises a session ready to submit searches.
No access points are supported: the STAT!Ref web-site does not provide any way of narrowing a search to a particular field, so Zpoint's STAT!Ref back-end performs only unfielded keyword searching.
Vendor: ProQuest
Z39.50 database name: hq
This back-end searches the Heritage Quest web-site at http://www.heritagequestonline.com/.
No access points are supported, only unfielded keyword searching.