[UPS] OA Dienst at arXiv

[Simeon Warner]

Carl, David, Thomas, Herbert (and CC: UPS),

We now have a subset implementation of Dienst5 running at arxiv.org.
It is currently running as /dienst/ and the old (v4) server is
running as /Dienst/. We will switch the URLs as soon as is convenient
for the Cornell/NCSTRL team (please tell me, note that our identifiers
now start `arXiv:', not `xxx:'). 

Please check it out and tell me about the bugs!

--
Simeon.



Details
-------

I have worked from the `Version 0.3 2000-01-20 06:54:24 -0500' version of 
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cdlrg/dienst/protocols/OpenArchivesDienst.htm
Below are comments and example URLs relating to sections of the spec., 
and for each of the OA subset verbs.


sec2.1 
  "For example, the unique archive identifier handlecorp can be 
  combined with the unique record identifier 11223 and separated 
  with the / (slash) character to form the full identifier 
  handlecorp/11223.   The full identifier is then used and returned 
  by Dienst requests."

As noted in an earlier email, working with CGI scripts the encoded
/ in the URL is not preserved when PATH_INFO is passed to the 
script. Thus, in places where `fullId' (or is it `fullID'?) are passed
as a fixed arg I treat it as two fixed args: `archive' and `papernum'
which I recombine with /.


sec2.2.1

If I read this correctly, a partitionspec may specify only one
partition, there is no facility for a list of partitions. It may,
however, specify any level of sub-partition. arXiv has just two 
levels of partitioning which gives two choices for the form of a
partitionspec:

1) top level, eg. `physics' or `math'
2) two level, eg. `physics;hep-th' or `math;GM'
   where List-Partitions gives:
      physics
        hep-th
	...
      math
        GM
	...
      ...      	

   
sec2.3
 
My current implementation returns an error if the version is not an
exact match to that implemented.


Disseminate

I have used the reply format shown in the Dienst spec and not in the 
oams spec. I'd like guidance as to what the current `correct' version
is. It seems to me that avoiding all the `oams:' prefixes to the
tags is cleaner but I am not an XML expert.

I have used `oams' not `OAMS'. I don't really care which it is but
I do think it should be consistent throughout: if the XML reply
contains tags like <oams...> then the name should be `oams'.

eg. 
  http://arXiv.org/dienst/Repository/1.0/Disseminate/arXiv:hep-th/9901001/%23oams/xml
  http://arXiv.org/dienst/Repository/1.0/Disseminate/arXiv:math/9901001/%23oams/xml

I have also copied the oams format to write XML replies for `rfc1807'
and `arXiv' meta-formats.

eg. 
  http://arXiv.org/dienst/Repository/1.0/Disseminate/arXiv:hep-th/9901001/%23rfc1807/xml
  http://arXiv.org/dienst/Repository/1.0/Disseminate/arXiv:hep-th/9901001/%23arXiv/xml

There is still work to be done on better parsing of the author/affiliation data.


List-Contents

I'm not really sure what we should do about such things as a request for
all the identifiers/metadata of the archive, eg:
  http://arXiv.org/dienst/Repository/4.0/List-Contents
At the moment there is a limit of 10000 hits; a malformed request error
is returned if that is exceeded:
  `Malformed request. Too many hits, limit is 10000.' 

Following the spec, I use the following arguments:
  Keyword args: partitionspec, file-after, meta-format
Should it actually be `partition' not `partitionspec'? 

eg.
  http://arXiv.org/dienst/Repository/4.0/List-Contents?file-after=2000-01-01
  http://arXiv.org/dienst/Repository/4.0/List-Contents?partitionspec=math&file-after=2000-01-01
  http://arXiv.org/dienst/Repository/4.0/List-Contents?partitionspec=math&file-after=2000-01-01&meta-format=oams
  
I think there are some problems with subpartitions.


List-Meta-Formats

eg.
  http://arXiv.org/dienst/Repository/1.0/List-Meta-Formats


List-Partitions

eg.
  http://arXiv.org/dienst/Repository/2.0/List-Partitions


Structure

All formats avaiable for all archives so I simply check that the record
exists and return the complete list of formats.

eg.
  http://arXiv.org/dienst/Repository/1.0/Structure/arXiv:hep-th/9701001?view=%23