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

Sandro Zic sandro.zic@zzoss.com
Sun, 11 May 2003 12:16:40 +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