RFC 3: OAI-PMH Support

• date: 2014-07-18
• author: Tom Kralidis
• contact: tomkralidis@gmail.com
• status: draft
• modified: 2014-08-13

Overview

This RFC describes the pycsw implementation of the The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (referred to as the OAI-PMH in the remainder of this document) provides an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting.

The OAI-PMH standard provides a straightforward API for listing metadata records. Temporal query of metadata modificatoin dates is supported. OAI-PMH does not support spatial, attribute or freetext searching.

Proposed Solution

Similar to pycsw’s SRU support, a simple wrapper will be implemented to:

• intercept OAI-PMH requests
• transform into the equivalent CSW request
• transform CSW response into OAI-PMH response

Implementation

Activating the feature

OAI-PMH support will be enabled by default. HTTP requests must be specified with mode=oaipmh in the base URL for OAI-PMH requests.

Files affected

• pycsw/oaipmh.py (implementation)
• pycsw/server.py (hooks)
• tests/suites/oaipmh (testsuite)
• docs/oaipmh.rst (docs)

Backwards Compatibility Issues

None expected, new functionality. Unit tests will all succeed. CITE tests will be 100% successful.

Internal Interface changes

None

Performance Implications

None

Related Bug Fixes

None

Restrictions

None

Documentation

The docs/oaipmh.rst document will be created and added to the main documentation.

Miscellaneous

Issue Tracking ID

https://github.com/geopython/pycsw/issues/199

Pull Request

https://github.com/geopython/pycsw/pull/265

Voting History

+1 from capooti, ahinz, tomkralidis, amercader, kalxas

Status

Adopted on 2014-07-27.