Back in the years of JISC-PerX, from the 33 data providers we studied, we also noticed potential issues with OAI-PMH due the misunderstandings around DC, the "low-barrier-entry" approach and the lack of Application Profiles.
But perhaps the problem is not DC nor OAI-PMH. A Spanish company has managed to create a business with DC & OAI-PMH:
http://www.digibis.com/en/
Vale muchachos!
Santy
________________________________________
From: Repositories discussion list [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Andy Powell [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2014 11:54 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: DC OAI-PMH
History again...
Re: 'the DC flat file format' makes no sense to me.
Unfortunately, this is a misunderstanding that, to this day, the DCMI has not managed to overcome. I don't really know why - I spent long enough trying so I see it as something of a personal failure.
My suspicion is that the 'flat' use of, so-called, simple DC in things like the OAI-PMH played a large part in promoting the misunderstanding and quite probably did harm to the adoption of both DC and OAI-PMH (though I may be out of touch) over the long term. Unfortunately, the alternative, and correct, world view of DC as being closely aligned with the RDF model struggled with the same kind of adoption issues as RDF itself.
I don't know CERIF, but my suspicion is that it probably represents a more realistic middle ground in terms of likelihood of adoption against expressive capability in the repositories space.
Andy Powell
Head of Strategic Communications
Eduserv
[log in to unmask] | 01225 474 319 | 07989 476 710
www.eduserv.org.uk | http://www.twitter.com/andypowe11 | http://www.eduserv.org.uk/blog | http://www.linkedin.com/company/eduserv
Eduserv is a company limited by guarantee (registered in England & Wales, company number: 3763109) and a charity (charity number 1079456), whose registered office is at Royal Mead, Railway Place, Bath, BA1 1SR.
-----Original Message-----
From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul Walk
Sent: 20 March 2014 17:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: DC OAI-PMH
Anna,
'the DC flat file format' makes no sense to me.
CERIF or Dublin Core (or many other things) can be serialised to XML - whereupon they are often conveyed in a file.
CERIF has an entity-relationship model behind it - I think this must be what you mean by 'normalised'. But so does Dublin Core.
Also - the word 'standard' is used variously in these discussions. I think the most usual meaning in this context is "agreement on what terms to use and in what arrangement". I don't see that CERIF is a standard in this sense, any more than Dublin Core is, as either will need extra constraints to be applied.
I think, perhaps, that the main point you are making is that "we can use CERIF". I agree. We could also use Dublin Core. However - CERIF has gained enough momentum for it to be the approach that I would back for future development.
So, we may be in essential agreement about what to do (if not why)
:-)
Cheers,
Paul
On 20 Mar 2014, at 17:26, Anna Clements <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> ... we don't need a new standard .. we can use CERIF. It will need guidelines agreed as happening for OpenAire, but being a normalised data structure (unlike the DC flat file format) it is inherently easier to identify where specific data items should be recorded. The semantic model within CERIF also allows flexible and scalable use of vocabularies and the mapping between them; and the ability to record time-stamped, role-based relationships between entities provides rich, and again scalable, contextual information.
>
> Anna
>
> ______________________________________________________
> Anna Clements | Head of Research Data and Information Services
>
> University of St Andrews Library | North Street | St Andrews | KY16
> 9TR|
> T:01334 462761 | @AnnaKClements
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Repositories discussion list [[log in to unmask]]
> on behalf of Jez Cope [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 20 March 2014 17:02
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: DC OAI-PMH
>
> I had a similar experience for the exceptionally simple use case of
> trying to map DOIs onto repository records, in naive hope of allowing
> users to look up a green OA copy of a paper from its DOI.
>
> I picked two repositories at random to try and do this with and found
> two completely different ways of reporting the DOI: one in dc:relation
> and one in dc:identifier.
>
> I suspect the problem is that for things like this, DC is too generic
> and therefore too open to interpretation.
>
> If anyone's interested, the code is here:
>
> https://github.com/jezcope/doi2oa
>
> Of course, coming up with a new standard does put me in mind of this
> cautionary tale:
>
> https://xkcd.com/927/
>
> Jez
>
> Chris Keene <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>
>> In the early days of repositories I know a lot of work went in to defining standards for making them inter-operable and to expose their data, notable the OAI initiative. I'm hoping some who were involved in (or who followed) those developments could help enlighten me.
>>
>> For a number of years I've been curious around the reasoning behind adopting Dublin Core via OAI-PMH as the de facto way to harvest and obtain metadata from a repository. (DC isn't the only format, but it is by far the most common used).
>>
>> To use data exposed by a system - such as a repository - the first thing I would have thought you need to do is interpret the incoming information.
>>
>> When reading information from an IR, the system/script that is importing it needs to establish a number of things:
>> - common bibliographic fields; title, authors, date, publisher, vol/issue, issn/isbn, publication title etc.
>> - DOI
>> - link to IR record
>> - is full text available? if so where, and in what format.
>> - what type of item is it.
>> - Description, citation, subjects etc.
>>
>> While using a common standard (DC) is clearly a good thing.
>> Processing the above can be a challenge, especially as different
>> repository software platforms and versions can present key pieces of
>> information in different ways. This is perhaps made a little harder
>> as there is no field to specify the software/version in the metadata
>> output
>>
>> I'll give a couple examples:
>> To extract the vol/issue/publication title involves looking at all the "dc:identifier" fields, identifying which identifier contains a citation, and then deconstruction the citation to extract the data (and parsing citations is no easy process in itself).
>>
>> To obtain if a record has the full text openly available, ie OA (with an Eprints system): Check to see if there is a dc:format - if it exists there is a file associated with the record.
>> But to check it is OA, and not locked down (which is quite common) find the dc:identifier which starts with the same domain name as the OAI interface, presume it is a link to the full text, try and access it, if you succeed (http status code 200) then it is OA. Though if you only have the metadata to work with and can't try and retrieve the URL while processing the record, you obviously can't do this.
>> Dspace provides quite different data via OAI-PMH so this method would not work.
>>
>> The reason I bring this up now is that I'm currently trying to improve how our repository records are displayed in our discovery system (Primo, from Ex Libris), the metadata is currently so poor we have hidden them.
>> A key concept of these systems is that they know which items the user has access to (across all the library's collections and subscriptions), and by default only returns those which the user can access. While Primo has quite a complex system for configuring how records are imported, it doesn't extend to the sort of logic described above.
>>
>> So from my specific use case (and other dabbling in this area) the data provided by OAI-PMH DC seems difficult to work with.
>>
>> I'd be interesting to learn a bit of the history of the thinking of how this approach cam about, and whether there are better approaches in processing the data than those I have described here.
>>
>> Regards, and thanks in advance to any insights Chris
>>
>> For reference here are two examples (you may find using Firefox, view
>> source, works best) Eprints (record with a file attached, but not OA)
>> http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/47853/ oai
>> http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/cgi/oai2?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
>> &identifier=oai:sro.sussex.ac.uk:47853
>>
>> Dspace
>> https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/164
>> http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/dspace-oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadat
>> aPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk:1842/164
>>
>>
>> Chris Keene - Technical Development Manager, University of Sussex
>> Library
>> Contact: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/150000
>
> --
> Jez Cope, Academic Digital Technologist Centre for Sustainable
> Chemical Technologies, University of Bath
> http://people.bath.ac.uk/jc619
>
> Please note: I check email at fixed intervals and aim to respond
> within 24 hours of receiving your message. If you need a response
> sooner, please use the following (in order of decreasing preference):
> IM (Jabber/XMPP): [log in to unmask]
> Skype: jezcope
> Twitter: @jezcope
> Tel: +44(0)1225 38 5827
-------------------------------------------
Paul Walk
http://www.paulwalk.net
-------------------------------------------
-----
Sunday Times Scottish University of the Year 2011-2013
Top in the UK for student experience
Fourth university in the UK and top in Scotland (National Student Survey 2012)
We invite research leaders and ambitious early career researchers to
join us in leading and driving research in key inter-disciplinary themes.
Please see www.hw.ac.uk/researchleaders for further information and how
to apply.
Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity
registered under charity number SC000278.
|
