The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) The OAI (http://www.openarchives.org/) defineshttp://www.openarchives.org/ A Metadata Harvesting Protocol (MHP), an application- independent interoperability framework that can be used by a variety of communities engaged in publishing content on the Web Two classes of participants –Data providers expose metadata about content –Service providers issue protocol requests to data providers OAI is a very simple, low-barrier-to-entry interface, shifting implementation complexity and operational processing load away from the data repositories to the developers of federated search services, repository redistribution services, etc.
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