[OAI-implementers] Experimental OAI Registry at UIUC

[Young,Jeff]

Why would someone use an oai-identifier resolver in the first place? The
answer seems to be that the oai-identifier has become disassociated from the
baseURL at some point in a process. If this disassociation was
unintentional, then such a resolver would give downstream process a chance
to recover the context. If it's not an oai-identifier, though, would
downstream processes even know that it IS OAI-related and they could
potentially look it up?

The solution seems to be to create processes that retain the context along
with the identifier, regardless of whether it conforms to the oai-identifier
scheme or not. One way would be to pass along the entire GetRecord request
instead of just the identifier. 

If an OAI repository registry such as the one Thomas created could assign a
unique ID to every repository it knows about (regardless of oai-identifier
compliance), that could be the basis for the PURL OAI scheme discussed in
the DLib paper. In this case, the PURL could be passed along in place of the
relatively ugly GetRecord request.

Jeff

>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: Xiaoming Liu [mailto:liu_x@lanl.gov]
>  Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2003 3:54 PM
>  To: Thomas G. Habing
>  Cc: oai-implementers@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu
>  Subject: Re: [OAI-implementers] Experimental OAI Registry at UIUC
>  
>  
>  On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Thomas G. Habing wrote:
>  
>  >
>  > Based on this database I also have developed an 
>  experimental OAI redirector.
>  >   If you have an OAI identifier (i.e. 
>  oai:PITTAEI.OAI2:558) but don't know
>  > where it came from, submit it to
>  >
>  >    http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/rx?oai:PITTAEI.OAI2:558
>  >
>  > and you will be redirected to the oai_dc format record for 
>  that id, if an
>  > appropriate baseURL can be found in the registry database. 
>   Unfortunately it
>  > appears than many sites, especially the GenericEprints, 
>  are using the same
>  > repo identifier (see 
>  http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/ListRepoIds.asp),
>  > so if there are multiple possible baseURLs for a given id, 
>  I have a ranking
>  > algorithm that attempts to guess the best. I may do some 
>  more work on this
>  > in the future, maybe looking at an OpenURL type resolver function.
>  
>  
>  Many data providers don't use oai-identifier schema, in extreme cases
>  for example dispute 
>  (http://dispute.library.uu.nl/cgi-bin/oai.pl) uses numbers
>  such as 3465,3481. It'll be extremely hard (or impossible) 
>  to develop a
>  resolver for this kind of identifier.
>  
>  I had same problem in DP9, I think the proposed PURL OAI schema
>  (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july03/young/07young.html) also 
>  needs to solve
>  the same problem.
>  
>  Probably some actions can be taken to ensure the possibility 
>  of a general
>  resolver?
>  
>  liu
>  
>  
>  >
>  > Anyway, feel free to try it out and let me know of any problems or
>  > suggestions you might have.  Also, if you know of any more 
>  OAI providers I
>  > should add let me know.
>  >
>  > Kind regards,
>  > 	Tom
>  >
>  > --
>  > Thomas Habing
>  > Research Programmer, Digital Library Projects
>  > University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
>  > 155 Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, MC-274
>  > thabing@uiuc.edu, (217) 244-4425
>  > http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu
>  >
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