2. The Open Archives Initiative Story
Thomas Krichel
Uni. of Surrey, Hitotsubashi Uni., Long Island Uni.

3. About this talk Follows essentially a historical approach
mixes in a few digital library concepts, interrupt me if you do not get some of them
does not represent an official statement
botches together various ideas from different people
benefited from funding by DLF, LANL, CLIR, JISC, DINI

4. UPS call 1999-07 Ginsparg, Luce and Van de Sompel
“The purpose of this call is the mobilisation of a core group to work towards achieving a universal service for author-archived literature”
emphasis on a pragmatic level of interoperability

5. UPS protoproto By Krichel, Nelson and Van de Sompel
found that the main problems of interoperability between eprint initiative are
poor metadata
no uniform identifier structure
unclear legal terms and conditions
lack of selective harvesting

6. Santa Fe meeting
Representatives of arXiv, cogprints, Highwire, NCSTRL, NDLTD, RePEc, SLAC/SPIRES and others
chaired by Lynch and Waters
sponsored by CLIR, LANL and SPARC

7. basic concepts
“Managed” or formal e-print archive; not papers on the web
Open e-print archive means that there is a machine interface
“record” can be metadata or metadata & full text
archive may be partitioned

8. business model Inspired by RePEc initiative
Separation between data providers and service providers
Many archives
Many metadata collections
Many services

9. requirements & realisations
Metadata harvesting (not distributed database)
Namespace
mandatory metadata & parallel sets
acceptable use
registration
OA Dienst subset
full id=archive|record
OAMS and XML transport
gentleperson’s agreement in a provider statement
primitive templates

10. technical model Subset of Dienst protocol used by NCSTRL
Compatible archive respond to 4 requests
List-Partitions
List-Meta-Formats
List-Contents (partitionspec, file-after, meta-format)
Disseminate (fullID, meta-format, content- type)

11. Dublin Core-ish Minimal Metadata for selective harvesting
optional
Display ID [R]
Abstract
Subject [R].
Comment [R]
Date for Discovery [R]
mandatory
Title
Date of Accession
Full ID
Author [R]

12. Implementation efforts
Implementation of Dienst subset
arXiv.org done
Cornell NCSTRL server done
WCR done
RePEc fails
Harvesting arXiv NCSTRL for a test library

13. Critique Why OAMS, not Dublin Core
Dienst subset carries a lot of legacy to the full dienst protocol that.

14. development in DL community
Interest in interoperability for a long time, stated interest of the digital library federation
trouble: two approaches
union catalogue
causes friction
distributed search
high entry requirement
problematic to implement

15. Harvard meeting
Vision statement: SFc a new way forward for interoperability
could the OAi develop in a more general fashion such that it can be used by different communities?
political agenda of OAi (free access) perceived as problem

16. San Antonio meeting
45 people show broad range of interest leads to problem of not getting lost.
View that SFc is a technical support infrastructure
Communities in different business and contents model can adopt the framework for interoperabilty

17. San Antonio meeting 2000-05 Carl’s reverse bubble
First there was the OAi that made the SFc.
Now there is the SFc that is implemented by more than the original OAi
discussion of what changes required to the OAi
steering committee
attract funding to develop other application domain

18. Ithaca meeting
Experience gained with implementing & discussing the current SFc specs
aim: new spec by the end of 2000
stable for experimentation but not definite
hope to minimise risks for implementors maximise chances for interoperability
SFc+ to translate from eprint domain interoperability towards general domain interoperability

19. Abstract concepts to keep
open eprint archive --> open archive
data provider / service provider
archive management
issue of records needed to be discussed OAMS confuses metadata and full text

20. Implementation features to keep
Metadata harvesting
OAi namespace
shared metadata and parallel metadata
acceptable use
registration of data and service providers

21. All change please, all change...
OAi DIENST replaced by OA protocol
OAi ID revised
OAMS replaced by wrapped DC
introduction of the concept of native metadata
generalised and marginalised partitions
revisited registrations

22. New OAi metadata
Accession date to be renamed datestamp and stripped of semantic link to the records
Full ID kept, colon used as canonical separator
unqualified DC is mandatory, but empty DC may be returned
introduction of the idea of native metadata
OAMS scrapped, Krichel and Warner to lead an EPMS discussion

23. Solution: encapsulate metadata
<oai>
<oai.fullid>dini:01</oai.fullid>
<oai:datestamp>” ”
<oai:datestamp>
<dc xmlns:dc=“…”>
<dc.title> Someone’s paper </dc.title>
</dc>
</oai>

24. Identifier Identifiers point to metadata records Concatenate
Case sensitive archive name
delimiter is a colon
anything internal to the archive appearing after that
prefixed by OAI as a pointer to a resolution mechanism

25. Sets replace partitions
ONLY for a local community to implement selective harvesting
there can be zero or more sets in an archive
records can exist at interior nodes in the set hierarchy
asking for records in a set returns records in the set and in all its subsets.

26. OA protocol Identify (no arguments, no exceptions)
ListMetadataFormats ([fullId]), response is the same as for the SFc
ListSets (no arguments, empty response ok)
ListRecord ([Sets] colon as separator)

27. OA protocol
ListContents ([sets][recordbefore] [recordafter][metaformat])
response as before but may contain
resumption token (set,recordbefore,recordafter)
errors 206,503,302
GetRecord (fullId)
response as before
error 404

28. Encoding via cgi General syntax
baseurl?verb=verbname&argname=argval...
baseurl is the location of the OA v1 protocol as registered at openarchives.org
verbname is the name of the verb
argname is the name of the attribute
argval is the value of the attribute

29. Registration of archives
Metadata format registration as now, names alphanumeric and underscore
Self-description introduced in the OA protocol through the identify verb
Fields of data provider templates
Natural language name
description url
archive id
maintainer (of OA interface)
version of OA protocol used
OA base url

30. Conclusion
After the Ithaca work, the OAi is set for another time of testing, with a broader set of tests rather than at the first time.
Many ideosyncracies of the old SFc have been removed, and that will increase the overall acceptability.
The new version one of the OAi protocol may be a bit more complicated than the SFc, but a lot more sound.
It still is not definite.