I'm interested, in this idea, if there is some movement towards
standardizing interaction with handle servers through webservices. I
haven't worked actively on handle for quite a while now - but seems like
a good move and I'd like to get involved again. The last time I looked
at this was back in 2001 when I presented a paper about some work I did
with Tony Hammond (now of Nature Publishing Group) at XML 2001
(http://www.idealliance.org/papers/xml2001/papers/html/03-02-06.html).
Regards
Eamonn Neylon
________________________________
From: handle-info-admin@cnri.reston.va.us
[mailto:handle-info-admin@cnri.reston.va.us] On Behalf Of Colin Alteveer
Sent: 16 November 2006 17:07
To: handle-info@cnri.reston.va.us; David Wirth
Subject: [Handle-info] Web Services for Handle Servers
Dear Handle Users,
Here at the Academic ADL Co-Lab we have been contemplating an
automated approach to Handle registration. After meeting with Henry
Jerez and Sean Reilly (CNRI), we have all decided it would be best to
start a working group of sorts to discuss existing implementations,
goals, and the best practice for programmatically creating/registering
Handles with our local Handle servers.
A Little Background
The main impetus for this functionality is our proof of concept work
on the ADL-R project. As opposed to having the local handle
administrator manually register every new handle, we would very much
like it to be an automated step in the publishing workflow of our
repository implementation. There are currently two client libraries for
HANDLE.NET, one written in Java and one in C. This poses a problem for
us because our repository is written in neither (it is written in
python), and even though there is a possibility of calling portions of
the C library, this isn't the most attractive or elegant approach. It
was thus tentatively agreed that perhaps an interface via web services
would be a better idea seeing as it is flexible and possible to
implement in many languages on the client side.
Requirements
Our proposed solution has the following requirements; client side
platform/language independence via 1) a web services API for
authenticating and creating sessions for admins/users of the handle
server, and 2) a web services API to the administrative functions of the
handle server.
If any of this interests you, or you have implementations you would
like to share please let Henry or I know you are interested in joining
the working group.
Colin Alteveer
Academic ADL Co-Lab
calteveer@academiccolab.org