Open Archives Initiative

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The Open Archives Initiative ( OAI ) is an initiative of operators of preprint and other document servers to make the electronic publications stored on these servers easier to find and use on the Internet . For this purpose, various simple techniques are developed and made available, in particular the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) for collecting and processing metadata .

The basic principle of OAI is that metadata can be freely shared. Some OAI data providers are therefore reluctant to see the contradicting commercial use of metadata.

OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), based on XML and REST , was developed in 2000 because many publications could not be easily found on the scattered servers of institutes and other university facilities. The OAI-PMH can also be used to transmit other data, e.g. B. Information on citations , and is supported by a growing number of institutions, e.g. B. also the Internet Archive .

In contrast to the Z39.50 protocol, for example , in which several hosts have to be addressed for each request during a distributed search , the OAI-PMH is used to collect metadata provided by so-called data providers . The collected bibliographic records are then processed by so-called service providers and made available for search queries. Due to the large number of metadata formats, the Dublin Core data model is prescribed as the lowest common denominator ; however, expansion with additional formats such as MARC using MARCXML is recommended and is also practiced.

The most important service providers include the search engines BASE , OAIster and ScientificCommons . These service providers develop the content of the document server and make it searchable.

OAI Object Reuse and Exchange

Under the name OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), the Open Archives Initiative is currently (2007) creating processes in addition to OAI-PMH to map the internal structure of digital objects in repositories and the links between them. A document can consist of different versions and formats (full text in PDF and HTML, metadata in RDF etc.), consist of different parts (chapters, images, files etc.) and have links to other documents (translation, citation, versioning etc.) ). The basic idea of ​​OAI-ORE is to map this internal structure of a document in a machine-readable way in a resource map and to make it available. OAI-ORE is also intended to simplify the reuse and changed composition of published content, as is common, for example, in the context of social software .

See also

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  1. ↑ Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting - v.2.0
  2. ^ Open Archives Initiative Protocol - Object Exchange and Reuse

Web links

Service provider