Featherweight Publishing Registries

[Walter Landry]

Markus Demleitner wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 09:49:55AM -0700, Walter Landry wrote:
> > The only reason I am looking for a new approach is because the current
> > approach does not work that well.  Part of that is because the
> 
> Well, as someone who's harvesting both using OAI-PMH and, in my case,
> plain TAP, I have to say I think it works well, and much better for
> this purpose than plain TAP.  That shouldn't come as a surprise,
> since (incremental) synchronisation is what OAI-PMH was designed for,
> and...

Harvesting Vizier's records takes more than a day.  That does not fit
my definition of "works well".  IRSA's implementation is also
pathetically slow.  We could spend effort to make it fast, but the
protocol is overly complicated.  We should not have to run a special
service for something this semantically simple.

As another example of a busy site that had problems with OAI-PMH,
Google got rid of support for it 8 years ago [1].  I found this
quote apropos:

 In the meantime, however, we've found that the information we gain
 from our support of OAI-PMH is disproportional to the amount of
 resources required to support it.  Fewer than 200 sites are using
 OAI-PMH for Google Sitemaps at the moment.

Sitemaps, RSS, and Atom are all widely implemented, well supported
international standards that are much easier to implement.  I would be
happier with any of them.

Cheers,
Walter Landry

[1] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2008/04/retiring-support-for-oai-pmh-in.html