OAI for VO registries

[Ray Plante]

Hi,

I've written a document entitled "An Evaluation of the Open Archives 
Initiative for VO Registries" which I've posted in the NVO Doc repository 
and the IVOA wiki site:

  http://bill.cacr.caltech.edu/cfdocs/usvo-pubs/files/evaloai.html
  http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/RegistryRequirements/evaloai.html

For those of you who saw an earlier draft, this final version completes 
the sections on "Fit to Requirements" and "Conclusions and 
Recommendations".  

The abstract is below.

cheers,
Ray

An Evaluation of the Open Archives Initiative for VO Registries

Abstract
The Open Archives Initiative is an effort within the digital library 
community to develop and promote interoperability standards that enable 
the dissemination of electronic content. At the core of the Initiative is 
the Protocal for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) standard through which a data 
repository can publish metadata about its holdings. While its heritage is 
in supporting "e-print" repositories, the intended market is clearly 
broader and could be used to publish any kind of data. In this document, I 
give an overview of the Harvesting Protocoal, evaluating it in terms of VO 
registry requirements. In conclusion, I make some recommendations about 
how OAI may be applied to VO registry applications. The OAI PMH does not 
address all of our requirements; however, it does have some nice features 
that could be made part of our overall registry solution.