[OAI-implementers] Reconsidering mandatory DC in OAI-PMH

[Alan Kent]

On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 03:55:50PM -0500, Tim Cole wrote:
> At the risk of becoming embroiled in a religious battle:

Too late :-)

> This is the crux of the issue. Does a harvesting service need to talk to
> a metadata provider before beginning to harvest that provider's
> metadata?
> Currently with OAI-PMH the answer is no, and many of us (both providers
> and harvesters) are glad of that since it simplifies our lives.

I think there is a slightly different crux. In the world of public
repositories, I think oai_dc is a wonderful thing to mandate. I think
the issue is people want to use the protocol in other environments.
In these other environments people want to say 'OAI-PMH conformant'.

Hence I can see the logic in breaking the current spec into two specs
as someone suggested.

(1) OAI-PMH - the protocol

(2) OAI-DC (or whatever the name is) - the conformance standard for
    public repositories. This is OAI-PMH plus oai_dc.

OAIster and all other such harvesting sites only deal with OAI-DC
conformant sites. People putting sites up as public repositories for
general harvesting must conform to OAI-DC, or else they are not a true
public repository.

These discussions have convinced me that having DC support as a standard
people can be validated against is a mandatory thing. I have not been
convinced that the protocol and oai_dc need to be in the one spec.

Alan

ps: The above opinions are my own and not that of my mother blah blah blah...