Exposing Nesstar Metadata for Harvesting With OAI-PMH
Nesstar now supports the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. A new stand alone component allows server administrators to expose a server's metadata for harvesting by others.
OAI-PMH is a standard protocol designed to make it simpler for data providers to open up their repositories and for service providers to harvest metadata. The protocol uses XML over HTTP and supports Dublin Core and DDI 1.2.
Getting Started With Nesstar OAI-PMH Server
All you have to do to get the Nesstar OAI-PMH server up and running, is to follow a few simple
steps.
The server can be installed in Tomcat or in an existing Nesstar server.
- Download and unzip the package
- In the package, edit the file WEB-INF/nesstaroai.properties and fill in these values:
- email.administrator: a comma-separated list of repository administrators.
- url.serverBase: The URL this OAI-PMH server will be reachable at.
- url.serverToDisseminate: The hostname of the server you wish to disseminate using OAI-PMH. [Note that this doesn't have to be the same server as the one you're installing into.]
- url.serverToDisseminate.port: The port the disseminated server runs at. Usually port 80.
- Install it in your favourite application server.
To install it in Nesstar, copy the app to <Nesstar root>/jboss/server/default/deploy/ and restart Nesstar.
- The server should be available at http://<your-servers-hostname>/oai-pmh
Known issues
- For Dublin Core metadata, the 'relation' field is not yet implemented, and the language field defaults to English (en).
- When disseminating Nesstar servers with many datasets (50+) the Identify command may run slowly.
This is due to missing caching of the date of the oldest study. - OAI identifiers are not yet implemented. Use Nesstar's own IDs when querying specific datasets.
These issues will be worked out in a later version.
This software is a beta version and bugs are likely to exist. Please send any bug reports, errors, annoyances, etc to nesstar-support@nesstar.com
