Owen wrote:

> Although part of the problem is that you might want to offer any service on
> the basis of an OpenURL the major use case is supply of a document (either
> online or via ILL) - so it strikes me you could look at DAIA
> http://www.gbv.de/wikis/cls/DAIA_-_Document_Availability_Information_API ?
> Jakob does this make sense?

Just having read Joel Spolsky's article about Architecture Astronauts 
that Mike pointed to [1] I hesitate to propagate what you can all do 
with DAIA. But your use case makes sense if you want to offer services 
provided or mediated by a specific institution (such as a library) with 
a specific publication.

Inspired by your idea to combine OpenURL and DAIA I update the DAIA perl 
library [2] and hacked a DAIA server that also understands some very 
limited OpenURL (it only knows books with ISBN):

You can look up which library has a specific publication in the GBV 
library union by its identifier:

http://ws.gbv.de/daia/gvk/?id=gvk:ppn:48574418X

or by OpenURL

http://ws.gbv.de/daia/gvk/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:book&rft.isbn=0-471-38393-7

Have a look at the simple source code of this script at

http://daia.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/daia/trunk/daiapm/examples/gvk.pl?view=markup

I want to stress that this demo DAIA server does not use the full 
expression power of DAIA, in fact it does not provide any availability 
information at at - but you hopefully get the concept.

Cheers
Jakob

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
[2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/daia/files/DAIA-0.27.tar.gz


-- 
Jakob Voß <[log in to unmask]>, skype: nichtich
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de