Registry: September 2008 Archives

From the beginning, the promise of web services generally -- and OCLC Grid Services specifically -- has been that as more services are deployed, the more options there will be to weave them together in interesting, effective, and imaginative ways. Here at OCLC we're already beginning to benefit from that in our own services.

For example, we've long known that a key piece of infrastructure for many of our web services would be a registry of all kinds of information related to institutions -- their catalog web address, the address of their OpenURL resolver, plus a pile of other things that would be needed by a variety of services we hoped to build down the road. We implemented this a while back as the WorldCat Registry.

Now, with the release of the WorldCat Search API, we are starting to see how various Grid Services can be knitted together to enrich the whole. When the WorldCat Search API returns search results, depending on the response type requested, it can be sending back information pulled from the WorldCat Registry -- such as the link to a library's catalog. Therefore, keeping your institution's information accurate and up-to-date in the WorldCat Registry will populate that information out into a growing set of services in a pain-free, effective, and efficient way. Now isn't that what this should all be about?