[OAI-implementers] OAI-PMH & SOAP

[Hussein Suleman]

hi

by my understanding of OAI, i think there are some slight misconceptions 
in this discussion and i am going to make a possibly non-pc attempt to 
address those from my personal perspective:

- OAI-PMH is not for everyone ... if we generalize it to serve the needs 
of every community it will not be as useful for the purposes for which 
it was intended originally (namely, high-quality metadata transfer among 
digital library systems)

- the primary users of OAI will not be "harvesters" (in the crawler 
sense) ... OAI is specifically NOT trying to create a better Google ... 
OAI-PMH is aimed at high-quality metadata transfer among managed digital 
libraries

- OAI-PMH is not the silver bullet ! this is a research project within 
the DL community. other people/communities ought to design protocols 
better suited to their needs (using SOAP if necessary).

this is not a political issue - most of us on this mailing list are 
technical/research people ... to all interested in SOAP, how about 
trying to implement OAI over SOAP and then discuss that ? this is after 
all an implementors mailing list ... personally, i am willing to try it 
- i just reread the SOAP spec the other day and it seems straightforward 
enough (to anyone willing to work with me, send me email). i cannot say 
"aye" or "nay" to SOAP until i have tested it and i think it is 
reasonable to expect the same of everyone else.

ttfn
----hussein

(yet another member of the tech committee, writing in a personal capacity)

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hussein suleman - hussein@vt.edu - vtcs - http://www.husseinsspace.com
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