[OAI-implementers] MOAI Server 1.0 Released

[Jasper Op de Coul]

MOAI Server 1.0 Released

4 May 2009 - Infrae is pleased to announce the first public release of
the MOAI Server. MOAI is a platform that aggregates input from disparate
sources and republishes it via the Open Archive Initiatives protocol for
metadata harvesting. MOAI is built for institutional repositories that
store relational metadata and asset files.

MOAI is open source software, released under a BSD license. For complete
technical information see the MOAI site: http://moai.infrae.com/.

What is the MOAI Server?
------------------------

MOAI is an open access server platform for institutional repositories.
The server aggregates content from disparate sources, transforms it,
stores it in a database, and (re)publishes the content, in one or many
OAI feeds. Each feed has its own configuration.

The server has a flexible system for combining records into sets and
uses these sets in the feed configuration. MOAI also comes with a simple
yet flexible authentication scheme that can easily be customized.
Besides providing authentication for the feeds, the authentication also
controls access to the assets.

MOAI is a standalone system that can be used in combination with any
repository software that comes with an OAI feed such as Fedora Commons,
EPrints or DSpace. It can also be used directly with an SQL database or
just a folder of XML files.

Features
--------

MOAI has a number of features that are not common to most OAI servers.
Besides serving OAI, MOAI can also harvest OAI. MOAI can transform the
incoming feeds. The OAI data can be reconfigured, cached, and further
enriched while it passes through the MOAI Server.

MOAI has the ability to:

     * Harvest data from different kinds of sources
     * Serve many OAI feeds from one MOAI Server, each with their own
       configuration
     * Turn metadata values into OAI sets on the fly, creating new
       collections
     * Use OAI sets to filter records shown in a feed, configurable for
       each feed
     * Work easily with relational data (e.g. if an author changes, the
       publication should also change)
     * Provide simple and robust authentication through integration with
       the Apache webserver
     * Serve assets through Apache while still using configurable
       authentication rules

In the coming period more features will be added and the MOAI product
page updated accordingly.

History
-------

The MOAI software is not young and has been in production use for a
number of years. It started its life under a different name as part of
the software for the RePub repository at Erasmus University Rotterdam in
the Netherlands. The software was built on top of the pyoai component,
an OAI server and client library developed for the university in 2003.
Many of the features that MOAI supports are a direct result of the
experience and excellent feedback from the Erasmus University library team.

In 2008 the Technical University Delft funded a project to refactor and
repackage the OAI server code from the Erasmus repository into a
standalone software package; this became MOAI.
Interaction with other systems and websites

Feeds from MOAI can be picked up by any system or search engine that
understands OAI metadata. If the system is a content management system
and has harvesting capabilities, the feed data can be stored, presented,
and searched within a website. Silva, a powerful CMS for organizations
that manage complex sites, has OAI Pack extensions that provide these
capabilities. The Silva CMS is also an Infrae product, see
http://infrae.com/products/silva.

Download
--------

The MOAI software is available on the PyPi site:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/MOAI.

A buildout is the easiest way to install MOAI; read an explanation on
the MOAI documentation site

Resources
---------

Documentation site: http://moai.infrae.com/

Mailing list: subscribe to the MOAI developers list at
https://lists.infrae.com/mailman/listinfo/moai-dev

Source code repository: https://svn.infrae.com/MOAI/

Contact
-------

FMI contact Jasper Op de Coul, jasper at infrae com, +31 10 243 7051.