The Open Archives Initiative (OAI)

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OAI verbs:
Identify
listMetadataFormats
listSets
listIdentifiers
listRecords
GetRecord ("CIMI SPECTRUM")

The Open Archives Initiative provides a framework for harvesting structured metadata. It requires "provider" applications to return Dublin Core metadata as a minimum, but allows other metadata formats to be returned in addition. There are six "verbs" which OAI Harvesters can use to communicate with OAI providers, as listed in the left-hand column.

I have set up a prototype OAI application for the MODES Web server, which is an executable CGI program. Clicking on each command on the left will open up a separate browser window. This contains the XML that has been returned from the mythical Burcester tutorial database, in response to this OAI request.

This application currently only returns Dublin Core metadata (and not much of that!) and the beginnings of an attempt at the CIMI SPECTRUM interchange format, but the application has been designed so that any number of different metadata formats can be returned. You simply write and deploy additional XSLT stylesheets, and update an XML control document, which lists the files to be searched and the metadata formats to be delivered.