get in touch with the Open Archives initiative by contacting openarchives@openarchives.org
The Open Archives Initiative provides a convention for interoperability among archives. Archives provide access to records. The word document is purposely avoided and the notion of a record is purposely imprecise. Some archives may just provide access to metadata, others may also provide access to metadata and full content in some form, others may provide other services associated with the metadata and content such as access to the full content in various manifestations (formats) or structural decompositions (e.g., individual pages, chapters, and the like).
This document describes the elements of the Open Archives Metadata Set. The semantics of this set has purposely been kept simple in the interest of easy creation and widest applicability. The expectation is that individual archives will maintain metadata with more expressive semantics and the Open Archives Dienst Subset provides the mechanism for retrieval of this more expressive metadata.
Notes on the remainder of this document:
The transfer syntax of the OAMS is XML. A DTD is given at the end of this document.
The semantics of the OAMS could be expressed using Dublin Core Element Set, with some qualification of those elements. Where the semantics of an element in the OAMS exactly matches that of one in the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, the definition of the Dublin Core element has been used.
All dates in OAMS are encoded using the "Complete date" variant of ISO8601. This format is CCYY-MM-DD where CC is the century, YY is the year, MM is the month of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December), and DD is the day of the month between 01 and 28 or 29 or 30 or 31, depending on length of month and whether it is a leap year.
A name given to the record.
The date when the record was entered into the archive. It is assumed that in most cases this date will be created automatically by the archive rather than entered by a human user.
A URL (Universal Resource Location) identifying a human readable
page that provides access to the possible manifestations (e.g., PostScript,
TeX) of the record. For archives that have only one manifestation
per record, this URL may point to that single manifestation.
The full identifier for a record in an archive. This full identifier is the concatenation of the following components:
A unique archive identifier consisting only of alphanumerical characters [a-z, A-Z, 0-9]. Registration of this identifier is done as part of the Open Archives registration process for data providers, described in Step 6 of the Santa Fe Convention.
Any printable non-alphanumeric character that will act as a delimiter (e.g., / : #)
An identifier for the record that is unique within the archive.
The combination of these components produces a globally unique full identifier for each record in the nature of a URN. An example of a Full ID is archive11/xxx4.
The author or corporate author who is responsible for creating the intellectual content of the record. Each author may also have an optional institution affiliation.
Text summarizing the contents of the record.
The topic of the content of the resources expressed as keywords, key phrases
or classification codes.
A free-text value that contains information outside the
scope of other defined elements that adds to the discoverability of the record.
A date relevant to the record that may aid the user trying to find the document. A common example of such a date would be an original publication date of a record that was placed in an archive at a later time (i.e., its date of accession is later than its date of publication).
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get in touch with the Open Archives initiative by contacting openarchives@openarchives.org |