Scope of registry

[Roy Williams]

> We surely need to define what services the Registry should
> provide - and recognise that we don't need to make an
> exhaustive list now because we should be able to extend it.
> All registries need to sign up to this set of services -
> or at least be able to specify what sub-set it adheres to

In the OAI model, there are exactly six verbs that the registry understands.
The verbs are:

Identify (who are you)
List Metadata Formats (what schemas do you have for metadata)
List Sets (collections hosted by this repository)
List Identifiers (return just the identifiers and dates of most recent
change)
List Records (return full records)
Get Record (return a full record from its identifier).

This is a pretty basic set of services!

If a registry has an OAI interface, it can have others too. ArXiv and ADS
brought up OAI long after they had their native interfaces.

In addition to OAI, we would need to define and implement a query language
using additional verbs. If, for example, we define each survey by its sky
coverage, then OAI provides no way to ask for every survey that covers
Orion.

Roy

--------
Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research
roy at cacr.caltech.edu
626 395 3670