[OAI-implementers] SOAP-PMH

[Pete Johnston]

> The Google API is showing, that a big company is investing in 
> SOAP. You 
> are right, that the Google API is offered on the searching 
> side. But to 
> build an index on OAI resources, a search engine would need the 
> possibility to harvest the mentioned 85,000 records. For this 
> purpose a 
> search engine would have to invest in OAI-PMH. That is the 
> question: are 
> they willing to invest besides of SOAP in the "niche" 
> protocol OAI-PMH?

I'm not sure it is strictly true that Google needs to invest in OAI-PMH
in order to "index on OAI resources". 

The Googlebot can crawl HTML representations of the metadata records
which are also exposed via OAI-PMH (assuming they are served at
persistent Google-friendly URIs etc) Isn't this exactly what services
like the DP9 gateway enable/provide?

http://dlib.cs.odu.edu/dp9/

As Jeff noted a couple of messages upthread, the issue is not SOAP v
OAI-PMH, or search v harvest, but whether an implementation of OAI-PMH
semantics over SOAP offers anything that is not available using the
current implementation over HTTP GET/POST.

Pete