The IMesh Toolkit

[ Work In Hand > Components > OAI Normalization tools]

OAI normalization tools

Description of OAI normalization tools work item.

The OAI (Open Archives Initiative) metadata harvesting protocol can be used within Subject Gateways, such as the RDN, to harvest metadata from different sources, providing a basis for cross-subject searching and browsing [1]. In their simplest form, the harvested records will conform to the OAI-defined DC XML Schema. (unqualified DC (Dublin Core) records, stored as XML).

These harvested metadata records may require some simple string-based transformations, for example, to deal with inconsistencies between records gathered from different sources. The records may need to be normalised to make them more consistent, for example so that they all use the same dc:type vocabulary. Another kind of transformation is changing Dewey notations to Dewey captions.
Thus there is a need to manipulate subject gateway metadata records, and this process may be automated to an extent. We will provide a tool that carries out a set of transformations on metadata records gathered using OAI-PMH, so that they are modified according to subject gateway needs.

In phase 1 we will produce a basic tool that carries out a small number of manipulations on records from the RDN, based on a number of transformation rules supplied by the RDN.

In phase 2, we will generalise the tool so that any modification needed can be expressed as a rule, that can then be applied to a set of records, producing the desired output. This will enable subject gateways to improve and re-use their metadata records, provided that the data is available as an XML record for input to the tool.

These pages were maintained by Monica Duke and Richard Waller of UKOLN, University of Bath.

This page was last updated on March 14th 2007.

The IMesh Toolkit project was funded under the NSF/JISC International Digital Libraries Initiative from September 1999 to July 2003.