[OAI-general] OAI identifiers / namespace

[Thomas G. Habing]

Jakob Voss wrote:
> 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.

Hi Jakob,

I've had a resolver service of sorts as part of the OAI Registry at UIUC
for a while.  For example,

http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/rx.asp?oai:HUBerlin.de:1253

will redirect to the actual record as oai_dc:

http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/OAI-2.0?verb=GetRecord&identifier=oai%3AHUBerlin%2Ede%3A1253&metadataPrefix=oai_dc

In addition, if you know the repository identifier you can find the
baseURL using the registry's OAI data provider, for example:

http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/px/oai.asp?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:id-registry.uiuc.edu:HUBerlin.de

The last part of the identifier is the repository identifier of the OAI
data provider to resolve, such as:

oai:id-registry.uiuc.edu:HUBerlin.de
oai:id-registry.uiuc.edu:www.mpi.nl
oai:id-registry.uiuc.edu:authors.library.caltech.edu
oai:id-registry.uiuc.edu:www.polona.pl

The above two services should work for any OAI repository that has a
unique repository identifier assign via the oai-identifier container in
their Identify response:

<description>
   <oai-identifier>
     <scheme>oai</scheme>
     <repositoryIdentifier>HUBerlin.de</repositoryIdentifier>
     <delimiter>:</delimiter>
     <sampleIdentifier>oai:HUBerlin.de:152</sampleIdentifier>
   </oai-identifier>
</description>


However, the above two services may or may not work for other
repositories depending on several factors, plus the resolver service
only redirects to the oai_dc record format.

You might want to also look at Jeff Young's ERROL service for a more
sophisticated resolver service that uses some of the features of the
UIUC registry:

http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/oairesolver/default.htm

Kind regards,
	Tom Habing


> 
> 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
> 
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-- 
Thomas G. Habing
Research Programmer
Grainger Engineering Library Information Center
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign