I've seen SRW as an obvious part of OAI from the beginning.  The existing
OAI standard addresses aggregating databases into larger collections.  But
what to you do with the larger aggregated databases?  SRW is clearly the
answer.

Ralph

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Kent [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 8:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: LC's planned SRW/U Implementation


On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 10:33:46AM -0500, Ray Denenberg wrote:
> "Stevens, Pat" wrote:
>
> > Sorry, but I don't quite understand the following: "we're discussing
plans
> > to access OAI via SRW (with a gateway)."  Is OAI, open archives
initiative?
>
> Yes, we're discussing an SRW-to-oai protocol gateway. Right now the
discussion
> is purely hypothetical; initially it would be only an experiment -- we
would
> use it to access our own oia records (at LC).  --Ray

Hypothetically, do you therefore see SRW as an alternative to OAI for
clients to access metadata (that is, harvesters come in via SRW
instead of OAI), or in additional to OAI?

My understanding of OAI is that there is no real search capabilities
(other than from and to dates and set names). Do you see SRW as an
alternative to OAI in that you can express these concepts as a SRW
query and so not need OAI really any more? (Harvesters can do SRW
queries for all changes since a certain date, then do multiple requests
for record ranges from the result set until they get all the records.)

Or do you want to keep your current musings internal at this stage :-)

As a database engine implementer, I had been looking at OAI from the
perspective of a service provider, not a data provider. SRW can then
be used to access the service (the harvested metadata). I guess there
is no reason SRW cannot be also made available at the data provider
too (if the OAI data provider implementation has enough power to
do searches).

I am guessing you don't see SRW as replacing OAI because OAI is so
simple and small - SRW is going to be more powerful in terms of
searching (unless you have a profile saying 'only these OAI-like
queries will be supported').

This is probably off track for SRW. I am curious from the point of
view of understanding intended uses of SRW.

Alan