[UPS] Open Archive Software

[Simeon Warner]

To Carl and cc: to everyone else,

The following are comments on the Open Archives Dienst subset defined in:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cdlrg/dienst/protocols/OpenArchivesDienst.htm
(Document Version 0.3 1999-12-22 15:44:37 -0500 )

General:
 OAMS or oams? -- all the OpenArchives pages refer to OAMS yet the Dienst
   docs refer to oams. 

Disseminate:
 Why #format? not just format?
 
 The example (according to spec.), should be
  Dienst/Repository/1.0/Disseminate/handlecorp%2f970101/%23oams/xml
 instead of
  Dienst/Repository/1.0/Disseminate/handlecorp/970101/%23oams/xml

 HOWEVER, it actually makes no difference because the CGI specification
 says that the PATH_INFO part of a URL should be decoded (ie %2f to /)
 before being passed to the script. See:   
   http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/env.html
 Also, noted by Apache at:
   http://bugs.apache.org/index/full/876

 I point this out because it means that fixed args in Dienst do
 not nicely allow `/' and other escaped characters through. Since arXiv
 identifiers contain a `/', I got caught out by this one. Keyword
 args (anything after `?') are passed un-decoded in QUERY_STRING.

List-Contents:
  Inconsistent use of partition/partitionspec

  Should there be a facility to list a set of partitions rather 
  than just one (or by default, all)?

  Here the meta-format option is inconsistent with Disseminate because
  there is no `#' before the format name.

  The return format seems strange with the fullId put after the record
  token:

  <List-Contents version="3.0">
    <record>
      handlecorp/970101  
      <rfc1807:rfc1807 xmlns:rfc1807="ftp://nic.merit.edu/document/rfc/rfc1807.txt">   
        <rfc1807:author>William Shakespeare</rfc1807:author>
        ....
      </rfc1807:rfc1807>  
    </record>
  ....
  </List-Contents>

  It would make more sense to me to have:

  <List-Contents version="3.0">
    <record fullId="handlecorp/970101">  
      <rfc1807:rfc1807 xmlns:rfc1807="ftp://nic.merit.edu/document/rfc/rfc1807.txt">   
        <rfc1807:author>William Shakespeare</rfc1807:author>
        ....
      </rfc1807:rfc1807>  
    </record>
  ....
  </List-Contents>

  which is then similar to the structure of the List-Partitions response.

Cheers,
Simeon.