David, thanks for the note about leveraging the Eliot Christian work.
The citations you provided address, in summary, four areas, I think:
- Z39.50.
- e-government.
- metasearch.
- geospatial applications.
I think that Z39.50 is already adequately cited in the charter.
E-government and geospatial application:
Alongside the effort to standardize a search protocol, we envision that
there will be several community profiles developed and either standardized
or formalized in some manner. The charter does mention that the work will
include at least one community profile (or that will ensure that at least
one will be developed, in OASIS or elsewhere. I think that most profiles
would be developed within the standards organization associated with the
community that the profile addresses. For example we in the bibliographic
community are even now preparing to begin development of a bibliographic
profile, and that work might well be carried out in NISO.
For E-government and geospatial applications, it would be fitting to have
profiles developed for one or both of these communities. I'm not sure
though that it would be appropriate to include such work explicitly in the
charter, however listing them as examples would be a good idea.
Metasearch:
I personally don't think that metasearch is appropriate for this charter.
Research over the past few years has hinted that metasearch is not easily
standardized, and in any case, its standarization is to some extent
orthogonal, and to some extent parallel to the standardization of a single
search protocol. The parallelism might suggest that some liaison reference
be added to the charter. There is a current effort in NISO to address
meatasearch, though to be honest there hasn't been much movement in that
group for a year or so.
--Ray