[OAI-implementers] Beginner questions

[Andy Powell]

On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Tim Brody wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Andy Powell" <a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk>
> > On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Tim Brody wrote:
> >
> > > DC.identifier = "http://www.myrepos.com/item/10"
> > > DC.identifier = "oai:myrepos:unique10" (i.e. you could also include the
> > > OAI identifier in the metadata)
> >
> > I tend to to disagree with this.  The OAI identifier is *not* an
> > identifier of the resource being described - it is an identifier of the
> > OAI item - therefore it shouldn't be repeated in the DC description.
>
> At the risk of being pedantic :-)
>
> This is referring to the oai-identifier scheme, rather than the more general
> OAI identifier (unique within a repository and a URI).
>
> "An item is conceptually a container that stores or dynamically generates
> metadata about a single resource in multiple formats", so it follows that
> the identifier for the OAI item uniquely identifies the resource, which
> fulfills the DC definition:
> "An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given [OAI] context."

Well, I still tend to disagree :-).  I assume that you are refering to

  http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html#Item

and below...  I quote:

 Note that the identifier described here [the item identifier] is not that
 of a resource .  The nature of a resource identifier is outside the scope
 of the OAI-PMH.  To facilitate access to the resource associated with
 harvested metadata, repositories should use an element in metadata
 records to establish a linkage between the record (and the identifier of
 its item) and the identifier (URL, URN, DOI, etc.) of the associated
 resource. The mandatory Dublin Core format provides the identifier
 element that should be used for this purpose.

The item identifier is not the same as the resource identifier - because
the item is not the same as the resource.

Andy.

> What is not defined is how to resolve an oai-identifier to the resource, but
> DC doesn't require that.
>
> All the best,
> Tim.
>
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