Registry Interface Working Draft Discussion Topic

Would it be useful for the harvesting interface to have a switch that allows harvesters to choose whether to get all records versus only thoses that originate from the harvestee?

Currently in our use of the OAI interface, we only emit records that originated with our particular registry. This keeps harvesters from having to sort out duplicate records from multiple sources. However, a harvesting client may be happy to go to a single (full) registry and just grab everything. Should we allow this latter type of harvesting?

If yes, we could support this using an OAI "set". By default, a harvesting interface would return everything (to be consistant with other OAI repositories outside of the VO). A special set called "ivo_managed" would be defined to return only those records that originate from that registry.

If you have an opinion, question, or comment about this topic, feel free to append your discussion below. Be sure to indicate your name as the author.

I think we should support this feature. This would be the easiest way to get all records from a single, full registry. This is particularly important to harvesters outside the VO that would benefit from a single location to harvest from.

-- RayPlante 30 mar 2005

Resolved: The current concensus on this question, based on the email discussion, is to support an owned vs. all switch and to impliment it using OAI groups.

-- RayPlante 05 may 2005