SRU/SRW profile

SRU (Search-Retrieve by URL) is a web-based information retrieval protocol designed by a loose consortium under the auspices of the Library of Congress as a successor to the older and more pedestrian protocol, Z39.50. It provides a means for expressing search requests, encoding them in URLs, sending them to servers and getting back results in a well-defined XML format. SRU is simple.

There is also a binding of the same protocol semantics over SOAP. This binding was previously known as SRW (Search-Retrieve Webservice), but the protocol name ``SRW'' is now deprecated, having been superseded by the more descriptive ``SRU over SOAP''.

The Zthes Profile for SRU provides a set of specifications prescribing the use of SRU to navigate remote thesauri. An SRU server conforming to this profile can expose its thesaurus to any conforming client, enabling its use in many applications. The Zthes SRU Profile depends on the Zthes Context Set.

The current version of the the Zthes SRU profile is version 1.0. Otherwise, in chronological order, we have:

• Version 0.5
  (This was the first released version of the SRW profile, and is numbered 0.5 because it corresponded semantically to version 0.5 of the Z39.50 profile.
• Version 1.0 [changes]