[OAI-implementers] Friends and Neighbours scheme ... locating OAIrepositories

[Steven Bird]

Alan Kent wrote:
> Registry is still required - at least one other person must know of
> your existance. It only saves having to go to a central place for
> registration. Whether this is good or bad is not yet clear to me
> since OAI wants globally unique repository identifiers (if they are
> not registered centrally, how to make sure they are globally unique?)

I favor a central registry to control the oai:... namespace.

How else can a data provider be sure of controlling their own oai:xyz:...
namespace, and avoid collisions (accidental or intentional) on oai
identifiers?  The chief incentive for data providers to register would be
to protect their own identifier namespace.

The central registry would also list which registered data providers are
valid (and for which protocol version), both as a service to the service
providers, and as a stimulus to data providers to be correct and
up-to-date.

-Steven

--
Steven.Bird@ldc.upenn.edu  http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb
Assoc Director, LDC; Adj Assoc Prof, CIS & Linguistics
Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania
3615 Market St, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19104-2608