[OAI-implementers] Aggregators and querying by repository identifier?

Alan Kent ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au
Thu, 7 Mar 2002 10:35:47 +1100


My understanding of OAI currently is that you can query by from/until
and by set, but can you query by repository identifier?

With the advent of aggregators, I am wondering if people are going
to want to be able to harvest from an aggregator selectivly based
on repository identifiers. Before aggregators it was not an issue
(a repository contained records of that repository). With aggregators,
my understanding is records will retain the OAI-identifier (and
hence repository identifier?) of the original repository, so a
aggregator will hold records from lots of different repositories.

I was thinking that sets should not be used, as the aggregator should
probably try to preserve the sets of the original data (have not
looked into if this is possible yet).

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Is there a need, or is it an overkill?
Just thinking about how I might try to implement the DP part of OAI
(on leave next week, so don't expect anything soon!), and if I did
so, I would probably make it dish up the OAI data that I have harvested
from other sites (ie: and aggregator).

Alan