[OAI-implementers] OAI identifier resolver

[Young,Jeff]

Xiaoming,

- The reason I moved away from the form
http://purl.org/oai/<metadata-format>/<oai-identifier> is because I'm trying
to avoid forcing others to parse such URL to get variant results. Now, the
service centers around a single basic URL that can produce a multitude of
results without parsing the URL by appending various types of extensions
rather than a set of URLs for each identifier. As of this morning's
revision, the hdl:1721.1/659 should no longer be ambiguous.

- My hope is that these URLs will be as natural-looking as possible, which
is why I'm advocating the assignment of meaningful repositoryIdentifiers
during the registration process, even for repositories that don't use the
oai-identifier schema.

Jeff

>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: Xiaoming Liu [mailto:liu_x@lanl.gov]
>  Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 1:47 PM
>  To: Young,Jeff
>  Cc: OAI-implementers (E-mail)
>  Subject: Re: [OAI-implementers] OAI identifier resolver
>  
>  Two comments:
>  
>  -- If URL takes the format
>  http://purl.org/oai/<metadata-format>/<oai-identifier>, it 
>  will make it
>  much easier to parse the special format identifier like 
>  hdl:1721.1/659,
>  the program will know whole part after "metadata-format" is
>  oai-identifier.
>  
>  -- I wonder if it's useful to assign repository ID by hashing
>  the baseURL, this will make it possible to develop 
>  applications without
>  prior agreement on unique ID of repositories.
>  
>  For example, the baseURL of DSpace (http://hpds1.mit.edu/oai/) can be
>  hashed to 2D0DA5560CAFBA3912A522345ECA4271 by MD5 algorithm. 
>  If both POI
>  and UIUC resolvers use this algorithm, the same repository ID can be
>  generated without prior agreement.
>  
>  xiaoming