[OAI-implementers] OAI compliant data provider for Plone or Zope?

[Eric Casteleijn]

Imre Simon wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> we are building a kind of a PloneFarm for a big Brazilian Science
> Foundation (Fapesp). The idea is that we have projects, like in
> SourceForge (actually we are also running a Gforge server, integrated
> with the Plone service), and that each projects receives a full Plone
> site to develop its home page. If anyone is interested to have a look,
> please visit these URLs:
> 
>   Home page of the web service, under beta-testing right now
>   http://incubadora.ansp.br
> 
>   Project Plonetarium (software implementing the Plone interface)
>   http://plonetarium.incubadora.ansp.br
>   
>   An international community dedicated to discuss Museums
>   http://forumpermanente.incubadora.ansp.br
>   
>   A group dedicated to translate a Python book published under GNU FDL
>   http://pensarCCpy.incubadora.ansp.br
>   
>   A germ of a wine encyclopedia (the beverage) built with a wiki,
>   trying to emulate wikipedia's functionality 
>   http://eBaco.incubadora.ansp.br
>   
> I am sorry to say, but all the documentation, as well as the projects
> themselves we have so far, is in Portuguese :-(
> 
> Anyway, this being a Science Foundation, where the service is to be
> used by the research projects being supported, the idea of having a
> built-in OAI compliant data provider came up a couple of days
> ago. Each project would upload their publications on their own page
> and fill out the corresponding OAI meta-data for each
> publication. Then the server could either just make available all the
> meta-data of all projects in an OAI compliant way or it could also
> provide a unified vision of the whole digital library, including
> comprehensive searches, comprehensive browsing etc.
> 
> Well, my question is this: does anyone know of some existing software
> for the Zope and/or Plone platforms which could either implement or at
> least facilitate our implementation of these ideas?

> Is there an OAI compliant data provider (like eprints or Dspace or
> CDSware) implemented on top of Zope or Plone?
> 
> I would appreciate any information you might have to help us.
> 
> I just want to add that all the software involved in the project is
> free software.

I'm not sure if this will be of use to you, because it is not an OAI 
data provider per se, but I am currently working on an OAI harvester in 
Zope/Silva for a customer of ours, the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, 
(Silva is an open source content management system, developed by Infrae, 
for which I work.) The harvester itself can collect all (or only 
selected) data from any number of OAI servers, and is independent of 
Silva. A Silva layer is used to present the harvested data in a 
user-friendly way, but I think it shouldn't be that hard to write your 
own presentation layer in vanilla Zope or something like Plone. This 
would help you to get existing OAI-data into your Zope-site, but would 
not be of use to you if you wanted to have a real OAI-Data provider 
written in Zope. Building that would not be that hard either, but I 
don't think it's on our short term to-do list. (It could be put there of 
course ;) The OAI-Harvester code will be released as open source, once 
it is in a stable and usable state, at the latest before September. If 
you (or anyone else) is interested in learning more, or having a look at 
the code while it is in a somewhat less stable state, contact me.

cheers,

eric casteleijn
infrae