[OAI-implementers] Queries and OAI

[Michael L. Nelson]

Hussein Suleman monitors this group, and its his research that the
article discusses
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/suleman/12suleman.html), but I'll
offer this response until he weighs in.

the example cited is most definitely an "extension" to OAI, and not part
of the core protocol.  in fact, OAI is designed to *not* be a distributed
search protocol, but with the wiggle room available in sets, you can make
it behave like a distributed search protocol (among other things) if you
really, really want.

what you should take home from your reading of their paper is that
communities can agree on many conventions within the OAI protocol
constructs that can result in extensions of functionality (without
breaking the SPs and DPs that are unaware of the extensions).

in addition to exploiting community standards in sets & metadata formats,
you can also imagine "reserved" ids for special records, conventions for
populating namespaces in ids, mirrors & aggregators, even conventions for
different OAI interfaces (e.g., biology.org/x/oai/ implies the existence
of biology.org/y/oai/), etc.

Hussein's paper describes some conventions that will be presumbably used
in the ETD project.  See also the linguistics community use of OAI in
larger framework of metadata interchange:

http://www.language-archives.org/docs.html

regards,

Michael

On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Alan Kent wrote:

> Hi. I was just reading through a DLib magazine article (Dec 2001), and
> noticed an article talking about OAI and using set id's to put queries into.
> The example was verb=ListIdentifiers&set=odlsearch1/computer%20science/1/10
> 
> Is there any general work being done on such things? Or is this just an
> individual group's idea as to one way to do things?
> 
> I was just wondering what the intended scope of OAI was - just metadata
> harvesting, or branching out into other areas such as searching too.
> 
> Alan
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---
Michael L. Nelson
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