Enforcing Interoperability with the Open Archives Initiative Repository Explorer Hussein Suleman, Digital Library Research Laboratory Virginia Tech

JCDL 2001 Slide 2 Overview of the OAI What is the Open Archives Initiative? What is the Metadata Harvesting Protocol? What is an Open Archive? History of the OAI Development of the OAI Protocol Brief description of the OAI Protocol

JCDL 2001 Slide 3 Repository Explorer Technical Testing Tool Simulates use of an archive (aka a Repository) by a typical service provider Allows browsing of an archive’s contents using only the OAI protocol (aka Exploring) Checks syntax and encoding of data Interactive and Non-interactive modes of testing

JCDL 2001 Slide 4 Motivation Chicken-and-egg problem with protocol Lack of service providers Need for “stub” routines Ambiguity in interpretation of protocol Need for validation of implementations Data quality assurances

JCDL 2001 Slide 5 Validation Procedure HTTP – check for server errors Schema – check for conformance to XML Schema Description Parser – check for validity of XML structure and encoding Protocol – check protocol-specific requirements HTTP Protocol Checker XML Parser XML Schema Processor

JCDL 2001 Slide 6 Interactive Browsing

JCDL 2001 Slide 7 Parameter Testing

JCDL 2001 Slide 8 Browsing

JCDL 2001 Slide 9 Browsing

JCDL 2001 Slide 10 Browsing

JCDL 2001 Slide 11 Browsing

JCDL 2001 Slide 12 Browsing

JCDL 2001 Slide 13 Multiple views of data

JCDL 2001 Slide 14 Multilingual Support

JCDL 2001 Slide 15 Automatic Test Suite

JCDL 2001 Slide 16 Error in Response

JCDL 2001 Slide 17 Error in XML

JCDL 2001 Slide 18 Conclusions and Future Work Compliance testing is a critical part of protocol development and support in interoperability efforts Support future versions of OAI protocol Generalize to other protocols

JCDL 2001 Slide 19 That’s All Folks !