1. Open Archive Initiative
Building a low-barrier interoperability framework
Carl Lagoze
Digital Library Research Group
Cornell University
Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Research Group
Cornell University
Presented By
Beeninder Dhanjal

2. What does the paper talk about?
History of OAI – Its origins in promoting E-prints
Broadening of its focus form E-prints to other domains
Details of its technical standard for Metadata Harvesting
Application of this standard (OAI)
Future Plans

3. Introduction What was the need for OAI ? Origin of OAI
Minutes of the Meeting

4. E-Print Origins
Scholarly disciplines are producing results at an increasing rapid pace.
It uses the Web as a vehicle for immediate dissemination of research findings.
The meeting adapted an Interoperability solution known as Metadata Harvesting.

5. Mission statement by the OAI steering committee
“The OAI develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.”
“ The OAI has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-prints archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program.”
“As more standards being developed and we begin to understand the structure and culture of various adopter communities, we expect that we will have to make continued evolutionary change to both the mission and organization of the OAI”

6. A framework for multiple communities
Figure from the original paper

7. It provides a low-barrier approach to interoperability.
Technical Framework
It provides a low-barrier approach to interoperability.
There are two classes of participants:
Service providers : Harvest metadata from data providers and use the
metadata as the basis for value-added service.
Data providers : Adopt OAI to expose metadata about their
contents.

8. Metadata Metadata requirements: Interoperability
Extensibility(Community Specific)
Interoperability is addressed by requiring that the OAI data providers supply metadata in a common format – Dublin Core Metadata Element set.
It might interfere with the goal of simple resource discovery -
Solution is to use parallel metadata sets.
Metadata records be structured as XML documents, which has a corresponding XML schema for validation.

9. Records A record is an XML-encoded byte stream that serves as a
packaging mechanism for harvested metadata.
Record has 3 parts:
1) Header : Consist of unique identifiers for the record.
Datestamp indicating creation,deletion dates.
2) Metadata : Contains DC metadata
3) About : Rights, Terms and conditions for usage.

10. Sample OAI Record
Figure from the paper.

11. Repositories and Identifiers
Metadata records are disseminated from Repositories.
Repositories contain items, and each metadata record harvested from a repository corresponds to an item.
Identifiers act as a key for extracting the metadata from a repository and hence must be Unique within the repository.

12. Selective Harvesting
Two relatively simple criteria for selective harvesting:
Date based : Based on date.
Set based : Protocol defines a set as “an optional construct for grouping items in a repository”
For a burdensome and large repository, ‘resumption token’ is a mechanism used for harvesting metadata for a single response.

13. Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Protocol
Protocol is carried within HTTP POST or GET methods.
Figure from the original paper

14. Summary of the Protocol request
Get Record
Identify
ListIdentifiers
ListMetadataFormats
ListRecords
ListSets

15. Data Provider Conformance and Registration
The OAI expects that data providers will fall into 3 layers of participation:
OAI-Conformant – These are the data providers who support the protocol definition.
OAI-Registered – These are the data providers who register in the OAI-maintained database.
OAI-Namespace-Registered – These are the data providers who choose to name their records in conformance with an OAI naming convention for identifiers.

16. Thank You