Hi Peter,

I completely agree with everything you just wrote, especially about
Atom + APP being more than just a technology for blogs.  APP is a
great lightweight alternative to WebDAV, and promising for all sorts
of data transfer.  The fact that it has developer groundswell is a
huge plus.  During my Princeton days Kevin Clarke and I briefly
talked about what a METS + APP metadata editing application could
do.  (I can't remember the answer, but I bet it would be snazzy.)

To stay on the OAI theme, I sometimes wish the activity of sharing
metadata used a push technology like APP instead of the OAI pull/
harvest approach that we use today.   One of the reasons is that I
feel it would be easier for the content providers to achieve deletes
via HTTP DELETE for deleted record behavior, simply because the
content providers would know to whom they PUT or POSTed their
metadata.  Service providers wouldn't have to support deleted
records, they'd just have to reindex.

I came to this realization out of frustration that most OAI toolkits
(at the time, ca. 2005) didn't support that functionality well -- or
at all.  I don't know if that's still the case.  However, the need to
delete records is a reality for most projects, and OAI has somewhat
awkwardly made us rethink how to "delete" a record in repositories
and the like, both on the service and data provider end.   You almost
have to build your entire system around handling "deleted" records
just for OAI exposure.   In reality it seems like you just end up
masquerading or re-representing its outward visibility on our local
systems, which gets onerous.

I guess the difference is that the growing number of Atom developers
are heeding the requirement for deletions, whereas the few existing
OAI toolkit developers have deemed that functionality as optional.

Long winded as usual,
Clay

On Oct 24, 2007, at 12:51 AM, pkeane wrote:

>
> This conversation about Atom is, I think, really an important one
> to have.
> As well designed and thought out as protocols & standards such as
> OAI-PMH,
> METS (and the budding OAI-ORE spec) are, they don't have that "viral"
> technology attribute of utter simplicity.  [snipped]

> I see numerous advantages to
> standardizing on Atom for any number of outward-facing
> services/end-points. I think it would be sad if Atom and AtomPub
> were seen
> only as technologies used by and for blogs/blogging.
>