On 9 Jan 2007, at 17:54, Santy Chumbe wrote:
> However, after a couple of years working with the PerX project
> (http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx), which has developed a pilot
> service using similar technology to what OJAX uses, such as OAI-PMH
> and Lucene; personally I am not totally convinced on the ultimate
> effectiveness of a metadata-centric search service created and
> sustained using mainly OAI-PMH. We have learned that in despite of
> its relative simplicity, an OAI-PMH service can be harder to
> implement and maintain than expected. We have spent a lot of
> effort harvesting, normalising and maintaining metadata obtained
> from OAI data providers. In particular the issue of metadata
> quality is an important factor here. A summary of our experiences
> dealing with OAI-PMH can be found at http://eprints.rclis.org/
> archive/00006394
Your paper raises many issues that are relevant to managing OAI-
services: managing the harvesting process, interpreting (and
correcting) OAI responses and interpreting OAI DC. All of these are
problematic!
CELESTIAL (celestial.eprints.org) offers some help with the first and
second of those problems by acting as a proxy OAI harvester and
normaliser. You should be able to reharvest corrected records from
CELESTIAL that were obtained from "any" OAI data provider (currently
812 sources are monitored). CELESTIAL is used as the basis of the
CITEBASE citation analysis and ranking service and the PRESERV
project preservation profile service.
The last of these problems (interpreting OAI DC) is addressed by the
Eprints Application Profile (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/
digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile). Although it will be a
while before all repositories take on board its recommendations, it
does provide clear and well-thought-out advice about how to map
repository metadata into an OAI container.
I'm interested in the OJAX implementation from the point of the
user's experience. Can Judith comm ent on how the Web 2.0 UI
facilities enhance the 'information seeking' activities of the end
users? Do they really help? And if so, which ones have the biggest
win? Autocompletion? Or dynamic content presentation?
--
Les Carr
|