Distributed Digital Library Service Registry The Ockham Service Registry

Support NSF / NSDL DLF Ockham collaborators –Emory –Notre Dame –Virginia Tech –Oregon State

Why a Registry?

Just-in-time (post) Coordination

Registry Provides Mechanism For JIT, Customized Service Coordination

Other Registries: JISC / IESR OCLC OpenURL Domain Name System (DNS) UDDI

Ockham DDLSR Services

Discover

Locate

Interface

Goal: Service-to-Service aka Machine-to-Machine

Current Status Version 0.7 released A couple of major features left –SRU/W Interface –Dropped peer handling

Some technical bits Using the JXTA framework for P2P / distributed functionality Java / Tomcat framework Use OAI-PMH to mirror metadata records in each node Hierarchical network topology to handle scalability of nodes

Reflections P2P –Useful in a distributed sense, but: Fairly heavyweight to implement Everyone must run a node –Current thinking: Distributed still has its advantages, but distributed <> p2p

Reflections Metadata –IESR is a comprehensive approach –Initial user feedback is that the amount of metadata to be entered is a barrier –Much of the metadata description targets the discovery need, and is not necessary for locate and interface (i.e. collection description)

Reflections Interface(s) –Still unclear which, if any, of the current interfaces will be most utilized Chicken and egg problem –Human UI is currently important, although it is not strictly “core”. Overlaying application layer built on top of a standard submit interface?

Research Questions Distributed? To DNS-like or not DNS-like Metadata model – minimalist or comprehensive? Which interfaces for Service-to-Service? –Discover, Locate, Interface –Get, Put, Parse? What’s the killer registry app? –CoiNS / OpenURL, meta-search, preservation, other?