[OAI-implementers] Trying to gauge interest on two features

Sandro Zic sandro.zic@zzoss.com
Sun, 11 May 2003 14:28:21 +0200


On Saturday 10 May 2003 19:03, Andy Powell wrote:
> > 2) Providing a SOAP search interface to the search engine. This is an XML
> > based protocol for exchanging information between clients and servers.
> > For example Google and Amazon provide SOAP interfaces to their systems.
>
> I'd look at using SRW as your SOAP interface...
>
>   http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw/

Why not additionally mimic the OAI interface on the SOAP/WSDL level for
harvesting purposes? I.e. the SOAP object could provide methods for RPC 
like
getRecord(), getIdentifiers() with the respective arguments (identifier,
until, ...) passed to them. Calling the remote procedures would return the
respective OAI result.

Has a kind of SOAP-OAI already been implemented somewhere or discussed 
on this
list? In fact, the OAI header corresponds to the SOAP envelope paradigm, 
both
use XML for data transport. SOAP does not only rely on HTTP, but would also
allow for asynchronous harvesting via SMTP.

Sandro