OAI-PMH could do this, yes. My personal opinion is to recommend
against using OAI-PMH, though. It has really only gained traction in
libraries (doing nothing to help break us from our niche), it's
limited with regards to expanding the functionality (meaning that to
do more sophisticated things, libraries will have to support OAI-PMH
/and/ something else), and I think it would continue to lock us into
this record-centric approach even longer.
Martin is suggesting linked data. Basically, the same URL you use for
the catalog record could also produce RDF (or XML or JSON or whatever,
but usually RDF) based on content negotiation. A web browser, which
almost always asks for */* would get text/html or
application/xhtml+xml but if the 'agent' asked for
'application/rdf+xml' or 'application/marc' or 'application/json', at
the same URI, they would get the resources available there. The API
is the URI, to use Martin's parlance.
Atom (and, yes, I know I am a tiresome, one-trick pony with this)
could also accomplish the same net result as OAI-PMH. It could bundle
resources, provide links to HTML versions and is extensible to search
(OpenSearch), read/write (AtomPub), etc. It also, generally, has a
lot more legs in the wider web sphere.
-Ross.
On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 5:42 AM, Bernhard Eversberg <ev_at_biblio.tu-bs.de> wrote:
> Karen Coyle wrote:
>>
>> I'm going to 'fourth' Owen's suggestion, or maybe second-and-a-half it, by
>> saying that the bibliographic data must be addressable, and the address must
>> return at least one actionable service, such as a copy of the record in a
>> standard format or a description of available services/formats. ...
>
> Right. The OAI protocol has the verb "GetRecord" to assist downloading
> of one record addressed by its IdNumber. Every OAI data provider has
> to implement at least the oai_dc format for that purpose, some of
> them also offer oai_marc. A Link to a record might then look like this:
>
> http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/db/katalog/oai.php?verb=GetRecord&identifier=573318972
>
> and the result ist coded in XML.
> Might this be the "standard format" catalog users would feel
> most comfortable with? Or something even simpler? But what?
> Reference Manager (RIS)? Wrapped in what way, which encoding?
> It can all be done with not much effort, tweaking the OAI scripts,
> but I'm afraid there isn't the one or two formats and wrappings that
> would make a large majority happy and able to use it.
> And of course, the internal id number is not what the end-user will
> have available to ask for a record. What else? ISBN doesn't cover
> everything and isn't reliable enough.
>
> What, in other words, would be the basic specs and requirements for this
> very first step into the linked data scenario?
>
> B.Eversberg
>
Received on Wed Mar 18 2009 - 10:02:45 EDT