OAI as VO Harvesting Interface

[Clive Page]

On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Ray Plante wrote:

> First for those not familiar with OAI, you can find a
> discussion of the use of OAI within a VO registry framework via
> http://rai.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~rplante/VO/metadata/evaloai.html.

Thanks for writing that, which I somehow missed before.

To me, the OAI scheme looks a good one from the point of enabling
harvesting, but it's a bit antique in its explicit dependence on HTTP GET
rather than SOAP/WSDL.  The other blind spot is that it assumes a flat
namespace for each resource, which is especially odd when they have
adopted XML, a hierarchical structure if ever there was one, for their
output.  I can hardly think of even one useful astronomical resource which
doesn't have at least a couple of levels of structure, and as I pointed
out yesterday some have ~4 levels.  I'd have thought this was pretty
generally true for scientific data resources.  Do we know how or if this
is being tackled in other fields, such as bioinformatics, geophysics, or
environmental science, who have similar problems to ours?


-- 
Clive Page
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester,    Tel +44 116 252 3551
Leicester, LE1 7RH,  U.K.   Fax +44 116 252 3311