[OAI-implementers] Interest in search engines?

[Alan Kent]

Hi all,

If you read my previous post, you probably know that I am going to
recrawl various OAI sites to rebuild my database. The first time I
did it, I tried to crawl everything in sight to see what happened.

This time around, I was wondering about reducing the list of sites
to crawl. The other thing I was thinking of was making a search
interface available. Is this of interest to anyone? Are people
happy with the status quo in terms of searching capabilities?
I ask only because I can either do whatever I feel like for my
personal satisfaction, or I could investigate providing a bit of a
service to others.

I was also not sure if I hosted a public search service, if I need
to ask permission from data source providers relating to copyright
and other legal issues. Records contain such information,
but I don't want to read through the records one by one! :-)
(This may be an interesting legal issue in its own right.
If someone provides data via OAI, how can a crawler know if
its allow to keep a local copy - or is this implicit by
providing a public OAI interface?)

Please note - I am still not looking at being a data provider, only a
service provider (at this stage anyway). And being in Australia, I am
not sure if (due to network distances and delays) I would be the most
logical site to host a search service. This is also still an evening
play job for me, so I will be doing things with minimal effort. But if
I can help out while playing, I am happy to do so.  And I can probably
convince work to spare me disk space on the public server here if I say
loaded up lots of OAI data and made it available via Z39.50 (XML record
syntax etc), ZiNG, etc as a bit of a demo of our product.

Anyway, if anyone had *needs* that were not being currently met in
terms of searching, it would be interesting to know what they were.

Alan

-- 
Alan Kent (mailto:ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au, http://www.mds.rmit.edu.au)
Postal: Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001.
Where: RMIT MDS, Bld 91, Level 3, 110 Victoria St, Carlton 3053, VIC Australia.
Phone: +61 3 9925 4114  Reception: +61 3 9925 4099  Fax: +61 3 9925 4098