The ICAT component for OAI-PMH

The latest release version of the OAI-PMH component icat.oaipmh can be found here (see "OAI-PMH component" link below), with detailed instructions to install and download the component.

It is designed as a new separate component and connects to the icat.server as a normal client via the standard API. 3 steps for the flexible mapping:

In a configuration file, select the entity classes that shall be exposed, along with relevant attributes and related objects
Out of that, icat.oaipmh generates an internal XML representation of this data using a one-to-one mapping from the ICAT schema
Use XSLT (extended schema language translation) provided as a separate configuration file to generate the output from that internal XML representation, transforming it into whatever we expose, mapping to any metadata standard you want

Example XSLT files for the most relevant cases (mapping generic ICAT investigation onto Dublin Core and DataCite e.g.) are provided as a starting point to write facility specific customised versions. Which means that ICAT-using facilities would only need to tweak the example XSLT files according to how they represent their data and would already be set, at least for Dublin Core and DataCite schemas.

A practical example of a run.properties configuration file:

# The metadata formats to be supported
metadataPrefixes   = oai_dc oai_datacite

oai_dc.xslt        = /path/to/oai_dc.xslt
oai_datacite.xslt  = /path/to/oai_datacite.xslt

# Identifiers for metadata configuration
data.configurations          = inv stud
data.inv.metadataPrefixes    = oai_dc oai_datacite
data.stud.metadataPrefixes   = oai_dc

# Relevant data objects and properties
data.inv.mainObject = Investigation
data.inv.stringProperties = summary doi title
data.inv.subPropertyLists = investigationUsers
data.inv.investigationUsers.stringProperties = role
data.inv.investigationUsers.subPropertyLists = user
data.inv.investigationUsers.user.stringProperties = fullName givenName familyName orcidId affiliation

From this list, the internal XML representation will be created (step 2 above) and the right XSLT file will be used to generate the external XML file for that specific harvester (step 3 above).

Learning path: Metadata catalogue services including PaN ontologies

Learning path: Metadata catalogue services including PaN ontologies