resource identifiers

[Roy Williams]

> There will be many cases when one will want to refer to a ResourceID
> as a single URI (such as in an OAI record).  In general, this will be
> done using the following syntax:
>
>    <AuthorityID>?resourceKey=<ResourceKey>&recordKey=<RecordKey>
>
> That is, for the above two examples,
>
>    ivo://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/nvo/registry?resourceKey=ADIL/SIA/targeted
>
ivo://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/nvo/registry?resourceKey=ADIL&recordKey=95.DR.01.01.
fits
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Ray

I have been trying to make my OAI registry compliant with this identifier
scheme, but it doesn't work because there is "=" and "&" in the identifier.

Why this is bad:
In the OAI protocol, there are times where the identifier is used as an
argument. So look at this example, which does GetRecord in Dublin Core skin
for the data collection called "adil".

Example:
http://mercury.cacr.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/OAI-XML/nvo/oai.pl?
verb=GetRecord&
identifier=ivo://mercury.cacr.caltech.edu/OAIprototype?resourceKey=dc-adil&
metadataPrefix=oai_dc

But it doesn't parse right because there is an equals sign "=" in the
identifier itself. There is a token that looks like key=value=value.

Please can we have an identifier syntax which has neither "&" nor "=" in it?

Suggestion:
Can we use colons instead?
ivo://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/nvo/registry:ADIL/SIA/targeted
ivo://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/nvo/registry:ADIL:95.DR.01.01.fits
ivo://mercury.cacr.caltech.edu/OAIprototype:dc-adil

Roy