[OAI-implementers] usefulness of free text fields

[Xiaoming Liu]

Hi,

It might be interesting to see how web crawler/robot works, search engines
like google traverse the Web automatically, and there is not something
like "right" level which restricts what crawler can do or not.

But there is a Robots Exclusion Protocol,
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html , by this protocol, "A Web site
administrator can indicate which parts of the site should not be vistsed
by a robot, by providing a specially formatted file on their site, in 
http://.../robots.txt. Note that these methods reply on cooperation from
the Robot, and are by no means guaranteed to work for every Robots."  

If we assume it's difficult to specify appropriate "right" level in oai,
probably we just let data providers have the right to "disallow/allow"
specific service provider.

regards,
Liu 



On Fri, 27 Jul 2001, Glen Newton wrote:

> 
> Thom Hickey (hickey@oclc.org) wrote:
> > I would agree that a free text field about rights to metadata is not useful.
> > I expect that a few levels could probably be made to work, although I'd stay
> > away from rights to the object pointed at.  That doesn't seem like where OAI
> > should be concentrating.
> > 
> > On the other hand, why are you publishing the metadata if you don't want it
> > used?  The best way to control rights will be by who you let into your
> > server and if it's a public server it would seem there is an expectation
> > that it may be consolidated by others into larger catalogs.
> 
> If this is indeed the case, then why have a usage tag at all, if
> everyone is assuming that all the metadata is public? It becomes
> rather meaningless. I personally do not think this is the case,
> otherwise we would be limiting the protovol and by extension, the
> metadata publishing and consuming communities.
> 
> -glen
> 
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