[Handle-info] Re: indirect handles actually implemented?

["Nick Nicholas" <nick.nicholas@lib.monash.edu.au>]

With regard to the "chooseby" attributes on the basis of which the
resolution of a Handle can be selected out of a range of URLs:

Sean indicated that CNRI would be interested in further feature
additions. The FRED project I worked on last year scoped
infrastructure for repository federation in the e-learning domain, and
one of the crucial use cases for repository federation is appropriate
copy delivery. (And after all, that's what the proposed locator
parameters are doing.) We went with OpenURL as a solution, talking to
Handles as the registry of available URLs per identifier. But our
analysis of what parameters resolution can be determined by may be of
interest: we found that in that domain, geographical location was only
one of the possible considerations.

The scenarios we gathered (with OpenURL illustrations of the
parameters involved) are at
http://fred.usq.edu.au/appropriatecopyscenarios.html

The conclusions we came up with were that the required parameters, in
order of priority, were:

1. Requester's institutional affiliation
1a. Alternative: Individual Requester identity (but that requires
non-trivial mapping: an email address domain will need munging to
translate to a choose-by attribute)
 2. User accessibility (visual, colour, hearing, physical)
3. Physical location
4. File format
5. Content language
6. Version of content

Some of these are too complex for a simple XML lookup to handle
(version), and are more appropriately dealt with behind an OpenURL
black box or another custom resolution service. Some of these can
already be dealt with in the HTTP protocol (language, possibly
accessibility), and need not be realised as distinct URLs. But for
portal-based access in particular, affiliation (and thus
authorisation) is more important than geographical location; and
geographical location can be more granular than countries.


-- 
===
Nick Nicholas
Business Analyst, PILIN Transition Project; Business Analyst, ARCHER Project
PILIN: c/- ARROW Project, Monash University Library, Building 4,
Monash University VIC 3800 Australia
Tel: (+61 3) 990 50590
ARCHER: 700 Blackburn Rd, Clayton VIC 3168, Australia
Tel: (+61 3) 990 20547
skype: opoudjis
Email: opoudjis@optushome.com.au


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