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

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sat, 2 Mar 2002, herbert van de sompel wrote:

> I have proposed the introduction of a ListFriends verb, which was supposed to
> do exactly what you describe, for inclusion in version 2.0 of the OAI-PMH.  I
> felt it would have been an interesting addition to the spec because it
> supported service providers in locating data poviders in a non-centralised
> manner.    However, the OAI-Tech committee has decided not to pursue it,
> mainly because we could not figure out what the incentives would be for a
> repository to do the additional work of keeping a list of "befriended" repos.
> 
> I wrote a white paper on it, in October 2001.  If you are interested please
> send me a private mail.

Here are a few incentives, in the context of distributed Eprint Archives
for disclosing institutions' full-text refereed research output.

(1) Archives have been remiss in registering themselves; this may make a
registry unnecessary, or automatic.

(2) Potential archivers and users have expressed concerns about how they
can be sure that search engines will pick up all and only the contents
of full-text refereed research archives like themselves.

(3) Such distributed archives will need interconnectivity for backup
(twinning, mirroring, upgrades), citation-linking, and version control.
For all this it would help if they all systematically knew of and
tracked one another.

My technical grasp is not sufficient for me to judge whether any or all
of these objectives can be or are being realized in other ways too,
but I mention them just in case.

Stevan Harnad

> Alan Kent wrote:
> 
> > Another mailing list I am on related to Z39.50 is talking about the
> > concept of "Friends and Neighbours". It may be a bit early for
> > OAI (not that many sites yet!), but the basic idea is that sites
> > keep track of what other sites they know of. That way, there does
> > not need to be a central registry as such. Theoretically someone
> > can write a crawler, start at one site, find out what other
> > sites it knows of, and work its way on from there.
> >
> > This allows major institutions with a real commitment to OAI to
> > maintain a list of other sites under their juristiction, with links
> > off to other places where similar lists are kept.
> >
> > One way this could be done in OAI for example is to define a new
> > XML schema for information on repositories. You then ask your first
> > site (you have to be given a starting point) what sites it knows of.
> > It will probably return itself (not mandatory for simple data provider
> > implementations), but it may return other sites it knows of.
> > The crawler can then go off and ask those sites what sites they know
> > of, and so on.
> >
> > Two things are needed to achieve this:
> >
> > (1) A definition of a new schema describing a OAI site. Probably only
> >     needs repository id, BaseURL, and protocol version. The Identify
> >     verb can be used on the site to get other information.
> >
> > (2) One or more of the data provider software implementors to support
> >     more than one record syntax (ie, not only dublin core).
> >
> > I am assuming that in OAI if you ask for data in a particular record
> > schema, you will only get records that were in that syntax.
> >
> > It seemed a better way of getting an up to date list of sites compared
> > to the current ListFriends.pl XML document at the www.openarchives.org
> > site. It allows the OAI protocol to maintain lists of OAI sites
> > in a distributed way. Aggregators just aggregate OAI site records
> > like any other record they would aggregate.
> >
> > I thought it was a cute idea.
> >
> > 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
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