[OAI-implementers] OAI identifiers

Stephen Crawley crawley@dstc.edu.au
Mon, 15 Dec 2003 09:50:25 +1000


hussein@cs.uct.ac.za said:
> a random observation ...
> i just looked at the schema for oai-identifier and realised that, yes,
>  it will only work for "oai" identifiers (something i didnt realise
> myself until now). two of the fields seem to be required but with
> fixed  values, while the sampleIdentifier embeds additional copies of
> the  repositoryIdentifier, schema and delimiter.

> in future, for network bandwidth, minimalism and normalisation
> reasons,  lets try to avoid this unnecessary duplication ... i know
> people will  say bandwidth is cheap but that argument only works if
> u're living in  some countries of the world and definitely not in
> south africa :) 

The OAI 2.0 protocol supports the compression of OAI response messages.
Compression algorithms like the one used in 'gzip' are extremely good at
eliminating this sort of redundancy.

-- Steve