[OAI-implementers] Looking for 2.0 server with completeListSize in resumptionToken

[Alan Kent]

On Thu, Jul 04, 2002 at 05:39:51PM +0100, Tim Brody wrote:
> Hi Alan,
> 
> I haven't noticed any replies to your mail, so I'll throw in my tuppence
> worth:

Hi. I actually got several replies directly that I have been testing
with - and got my end working nicely (thanks to everyone who replied).

> 1) Not as far as I know. And, IMHO, it is very unlikely there ever will be
> (knowing how big a response set is does not help the fact that the entire
> response has to be harvested, so why does it matter?).

*Personally* I tend to find the time you do big harvests is the first
time you add a new big site to your set of sites you harvest from.
Adding a new site for the first time is the most likely time things
will fail. Hence I tend to watch it for the first while to make sure
things are moving along. For this reason, our harvester implementation
outputs running messages (a '.' per record, when POST requests are
sent etc) just to show things are happening. The administrator of
the our application can then view these trace messages. Errors are
logged permanently in a database for future reference, but trace messages
we just keep around during a harvest so an administrator can feel
confident something is happening. Since a human is watching, the %
completion is useful.

But I agree, its not an earth shattering feature of OAI. But I do
find it useful. (I can easily compute after the first few % messages
how long the harvest is going to take to complete.)

> 2) Versioning is an issue that hasn't been addressed by the OAI community? I
> have made the assumption that the top-level element of an OAI response
> contains a namespace identifier which can be resolved to a version. I have a
> table of XMLNS -> version (e.g.
> 'http://www.openarchives.org/oai/1.0/oai_getrecord' => '1.0'), with some
> capability to account for variability in implementation (e.g. convert to
> lowercase, remove tailing /).

The protocol has versioning addressed fine. My question was more that
as a *developer* I was interested in finding out which sites were at
which protocol levels. I think you were referring back to my question
about the list of servers on the OAI site. My comment was more "hey,
for developers, wouldn't it be useful if the sites showed what version
they supported so I didn't have to manually try each one, one-by-one,
to find a 2.0 server". No big deal.

Thanks for the reply
Alan
-- 
Alan Kent (mailto:ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au, http://www.mds.rmit.edu.au/~ajk/)
Project: TeraText Technical Director, InQuirion Pty Ltd (www.inquirion.com)
Postal: Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001.
Where: RMIT MDS, Bld 91, Level 3, 110 Victoria St, Carlton 3053, VIC Australia.
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