Roger,
we use OAI to sync data from various sources on our marine science portals and it works fine.. we use it for metadata in DIF XML and ISO 19136 format. For some first tests with OAI you could try the DLESE software which is available at: http://www.dlese.org/library/index.jsp well, I think the Lucene will not work with metadata other than dublin core, but harvesting etc should work fine with metadata in e.g. darwin core..
best regards, Robert
Dr. Robert Huber WDC-MARE / PANGAEA - www.pangaea.de, www.wdc-mare.org Stratigraphy.net - www.stratigraphy.net _____________________________________________ MARUM - Institute for Marine Environmental Sciences (location) University Bremen Leobener Strasse POP 330 440 28359 Bremen Phone ++49 421 218-65593, Fax ++49 421 218-65505 e-mail rhuber@wdc-mare.org, robert.huber@stratigraphy.net
I have been proposing that a standard harvesting protocol should be adopted. OAI was the top candidate but I haven't had time to look into it and I don't think anybody else has. I just noticed Rod is suggesting OpenSearch. I'd like to see some one have a look into these alternatives after October and try and come up with some recommendations/applicability statements. OAI has the notion of subsets of data and it would be good to have some method of sharing subset names etc.