[OAI-general] OAI identifiers / namespace

[Jakob Voss]

Hi!

Is there is service provider that can be used as a link resolver for OIA
identifiers? OAI-IDs could be very useful to identify resources in the
same way as DOI (or even better because you can get all the metadata in
machine readable format and OAI is free) but up to now I have not found
a way to get the document and/or metadata of a given OAI-ID. The problem
is to find out the base url of the data provider if you only know the
OAI-ID.

After some trying out I found that the service provider for German data
providers at Humboldt-University can be linked with OAI-ID:

http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/e_suche/oaidetails.php?identifier=oai:HUBerlin.de:1253
http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/e_suche/oaidetails.php?identifier=oai:fraunhofer.de:N-45459

but if you provide an unknown ID there is no further message and the
result page does not include a way how to get the metadata in DC in XML.

The Indentify Response Format includes the "repositoryIdentifier"
element that corresponds with the sub-namespace of OAI-IDs so it should
be not very complicated to create such a service provider.[*] Has anyone
already done it?

Greetings,
Jakob Voss