Open Meta Tools Make It Big

Morgahastu writes "Byte.com has a great article about open meta tools and open software in general: "After more than 10 years of open-software development in the scientific community, open software now holds a preeminent place in the operation of the computing community. The three products I have written about simply scratch the surface of the powerful tools available. OpenLDAP and OAI both enable a wide variety of sharing and automated access.""

Comments

Re:OAI - What metadata specs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The OAI spec mandates that data providers support unqualified Dublin Core, but you can provide any other metadata format you want in addition to Dublin Core (as long as there's an XML schema defining the format available). So, both
PRISM and SCORM should work with OAI (although
you might have to whip up an XML schema for
PRISM -- I'm not sure there's an official one in the works). Various communities are looking at OAI for exchanging non-Dublin Core metadata; librarians are looking at it for exchanging MARC data and other forms of metadata (such as the MODS and METS formats). I'd be surprised if someone isn't already trying to do an OAI/SCORM project.

Jerome McDonough
NYU Digital Library Team
jerome.mcdonough@nyu.edu

Re:To a man with a hammer...

[andyr]

Use LDAP as a library card file? Perhaps you could, but that sounds like a classic database application to me. Powerful search functions? Like SQL?

The Lightweight part of LDAP means that it is optimised for reading, and does not expect to be written to very much. Databases, on the other hand, could be considered heavyweight because, with transactions, they can guarantee the accuracy of the data.

You cannot run an airline reservation system on LDAP. If I update LDAP information, the next few readers might get stale data.

LDAP is thus lighter on resources, and, IMHO, would be a better tool for a library index.