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

Hussein Suleman hussein@cs.uct.ac.za
Mon, 12 May 2003 10:38:28 +0200


hi Sandro

i presume that by now you have seen my other message to the implementers 
list about our current work on SOAP and OAI here at UCT. if you have any 
questions (or if you are interested in collaborating wrt our 
experiments), please feel free to contact me off the list.

but, as a summary, and because this went out to oai-general as well,
- yes, there are lots of us interested in SOAP and PMH
- the last OAI technical committee explicitly designed PMHv2 for 
possible SOAP support in the future, so it is no accident that the 
paradigm matches :)
- there have been experiments with SOAP and PMH going back quite some 
time, but there hasn't been enough solid evidence that SOAP will benefit 
the PMH or that SOAP is a stable standard that's here to stay (case in 
point: a new proposed recommendation was released last wednesday!)
- i do believe OAI will consider a SOAP version soon, especially as the 
W3C looks like it is finally going to endorse a SOAP standard soon and 
not have us all rely on a "technical note" as the existing "standard" is 
denoted

however, until we have a standard SOAP-PMH binding, i think it is wise 
to contain our enthusiasm :) and stick to controlled experiments so we 
prevent the scenario where there are various different flavours of SOAP 
bindings being exposed publicly. i am sure that once the OAI begins work 
on this issue, appropriate calls for participation and announcements 
will be made on the OAI mailings lists.

ttfn,
----hussein


Sandro Zic wrote:
> 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
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