OAI for Beginners

[Tony Linde]

At the interop meeting last week, the Registry workgroup decided to formally
adopt OAI-PMH as the basis for its harvesting interfaces: both a simple http
accessible version and an (optional for publishing registries, mandatory for
full registries) advanced web service based version.

For those unfamiliar with OAI, the best starting point would be the Open
Archives Initiative web site:
  http://www.openarchives.org/

For the full OAI-PMH spec, look at:
  http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html 
and for 'an introduction to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for
Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)', try the tutorial at:
  http://www.oaforum.org/tutorial/

Those who attended the kickoff meeting for this workgroup will remember the
talk given by Andy Powell of UKOLN (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/) on OAI  and
that talk is still downloadable from
http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/Registry19032003. 

Kevin Benson was charged with updating the RI spec to v0.11, including the
incorporation of OAI-PMH, so it'd be useful for those engaged in the
Registry discussions to get themselves up to date with OAI-PMH before then.

Cheers,
Tony. 

__
Tony Linde                 
Phone:  +44 (0)116 223 1292    Mobile: +44 (0)7753 603356
Fax:    +44 (0)116 252 3311    Email:  ael at star.le.ac.uk
Post:   Department of Physics & Astronomy,
        University of Leicester
        Leicester, UK   LE1 7RH

Project Manager,            Director,
AstroGrid                   Leicester e-Science Centre
http://www.astrogrid.org    http://www.e-science.le.ac.uk/