[OSGeodata] RE: Ready for a lean and mean Catalogue Service Protocol Spec

[Stefan F. Keller]

The more I dig into OAI-PMH the more I get the impression having found an
initial solution for this so called 'Catalogue Service Protocol' (or
whatever it's better name should be...). I wonder why OAI is not more well
known given the fact that GOS 2 papers mention it, but I have not found any
detailed information. Did anybody do similar investigations?

What bothers me in search of such a protocol is, that I am not sure whether
we have common basic assuptions about the goal of the protocol. CSW 2 does
not explain much of these but I suspect that there could be some
discrepancies, especially regarding discovery and binding. By harvesting
OAI-PMH - and me too - means that (meta) data is queried before hand by a
service provider. This does'nt exclude on-the-fly query (basic assumption in
CSW?) but it is the preferred mode, because metadata volumes are low and it
scales.

Binding is done using this 'protocol information' I mentioned before - and a
subsequent self describing request command - which is probably the only
additional DCMI element besides coverage (= bbox) to be specified in the
specialized Dublin Core metadata information model. Additional information
about service types and or file formats relies on the protocol indicated by
the 'protocol information'.

Jo was enthusiastic to implement something immediately. So why no go with
OAI-PMH? We have even the choice of some (almost) ready implementations if
you look at http://www.openarchives.org/tools/tools.html as well as
http://sf.net where a search for OAI gives 27 results.

-- Stefan
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