[OAI-implementers] OAI 2.0? (XML namespaces change request)

herbert van de sompel hvdsomp@yahoo.com
Sat, 02 Mar 2002 09:26:44 +0000


hi Alan,

Consider it done.  There will be a single namespace for OAI-PMH version 2.0 .

This issue has come up before, and now is the time to address it
appropriately.

BTW: release date of version 2.0 is expected May 1st 2002.

Thanks,

herbert van de sompel

Alan Kent wrote:

> Is OAI 2.0 still planned to be released end of March (or is my
> memory faulty)? I am not sure if this is the forum for change
> requests, but I have one hopefully minor thing I would like to
> see changed. This may be a known issue, but I just hit it in
> some code I was writing, so thought I would mail again just
> in case.
>
> At present, a separate namespace is defined per verb (GetRecords,
> ListRecords, etc). Could this be changed for one namespace for
> an OAI version? I can see no benefit in having one namespace
> per verb, and there are real disadvantages when tryiing to
> write namespace aware code.
>
> At the risk of preaching to the knowledgable, when you use a
> namespace aware tool, the element name is not just the name
> in the tag (<record>, <metadata> etc), its the element name
> (local name) plus the namespace name. For convenience, some
> people write this as {http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/1.1/GetRecord}record
> (I might have the namespace wrong, but you get the idea).
>
> I am in the process of reworking my harvester code based on my
> better knoweldge and experience with OAI. It turns out my old
> program discarded some information that was important - so I
> have to recrawl everything <:-(. Oh well. So the new code I
> am trying to do correctly with namespaces etc.
>
> The problem I am hitting is that all the full names of elements
> change depending on whether its a GetRecord request or a ListRecords
> request. I cannot write generic code (easily) to process a
> <record> element, because the name is one of
>
>     {http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/1.1/GetRecord}record
>     {http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/1.1/ListRecords}record
>
> It is not correct to ignore the namespace name, so everywhere
> I check element names, I have to check for multiple element names.
>
> With OAI 2.0 coming along, it would make life easier if a single
> namespace URI was used for the whole protocol meaning the <record>
> full name in both GetRecord and ListRecords would become
>
>     {http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/}record
>
> Thanks!
> Alan
> --
> Alan Kent (mailto:ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au, http://www.mds.rmit.edu.au)
> Postal: Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001.
> Where: RMIT MDS, Bld 91, Level 3, 110 Victoria St, Carlton 3053, VIC
> Australia.
> Phone: +61 3 9925 4114  Reception: +61 3 9925 4099  Fax: +61 3 9925 4098
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