On 6 May 2008, at 17:34, Andy Powell wrote:
>> From the perspective of the "web", the "resources of
>> interest" (or just "resources", since that is a key piece of
>> terminology in the definition of the web) are the individual
>> files that can be downloaded via the web (HTTP) protocol.
> Yes... though note that the Web architecture use of "resource"
> encompasses anything that is of interest including digital objects,
> physical objects and conceptual entities - so it is much more than the
> "files that can be downloaded".

Agreed, but I was responding to your point that the resources of  
interest in a repository are the FILES and that OAI had chosen to  
identify the wrong things. I was making the counter point that the  
resources of interest in a repository are abstract bibliographic items  
(items in the literature), not the files themselves. At least that was  
the case for the "repositories" represented at the OAI meeting.

> "Note that the identifier described here is not that of a resource.  
> The
> nature of a resource identifier is outside the scope of the OAI-PMH."
> so in that sense the OAI-PMH ignores (i.e. doesn't model) the  
> "resources
> of interest".
Not of your interest, no :-) It is certainly possible to argue that  
the "OAI-PMH items of interest" are not of interest to anyone but OAI  
service providers!

>  Hence the need for initiatives like SWAP which say,
> "here's a view of the world that we need to share metadata about" and
> "here's the kind of metadata we want to share about the entities in  
> that
> world-view".

Quite - it's the worldviews that need to be improved.

OAI defines one worldview - and a potentially very skewed one at that.  
It is a worldview that is about the bulk exchange of bibliographic  
metadata. SWAP - which is based on FRBR - provides another world view  
that is based on the world of cataloguing publishers' products. The  
Web provides a worldview which is all about serving "information  
resources".

None of these reflects the reality of a repository accurately enough  
to describe a repository's holdings in terms of the modern scholarly  
communications processes and the scholar-as-information-provider- 
worldview.
--
Les

PS By the way, getting back to the original topic, I think that this  
split between worldviews makes it very difficult for a repository to  
serve an accurate Google SiteMap. I don't think any of the platforms  
keep track of when a particular web page changes, but we all know when  
an item's metadata has changed. The two are not the same, especially  
when repository software is upgraded, or Institutional Visual Identity  
or Branding is changed. URIs may be persistent, but the HTML files  
that they resolve to may undergo all sorts of changes that a  
repository fails to keep track of.