Making Legacy Databases OAI-Compliant

"Francis Jayakanth has been working on making legacy databases OAI-compliant. In February 2005 he finished a six-month Fulbright fellowship at Old Dominion University (supervised by Mohammad Zubair and Kurt Maly) focused on an OAI-compliant version of UNESCO's CDS/ISIS database for managing textual data. Quoting Jayakanth (personal correspondence): 'We have devised two approaches - Static and Dynamic, to make CDS/ISIS databases OAI-compliant. In the static approach, the database records are exported on to a file. This file is then converted to static repository xml file. This xml file can be ingested in to the Kepler system, a light-weight, self contained OAI-compliant tool for the individuals. Or, the xml file could be made OAI-compliant through the intermediation of static repository gateway. The static approach has found a mention in the above mentioned UNESCO's site. Since the static repository has certain limitations, we came out with the dynamic approach. This approach required developing a gateway program. This gateway program will accept OAI requests and translate the requests to corresponding search expression for the CDS/ISIS database, carry out the search, and translate the resulting set to xml format. The advantage of the dynamic approach over the static is that there is a real time interaction with the CDS/ISIS databases. We have set up a sample harvesting service for a few sample CDS/ISIS/isis databases using the Arc software... The metadata from sample CDS/ISIS databases were were harvested in...real-time, using the gateway software developed for the purpose.'"

Source: P.Suber. Making legacy databases OAI-compliant OANews Blog (15 June 2005) [FullText]