Title: Open Archives Initiative/Internet2-Distributed Storage Channel On Campus
· Number of people: 2
· Goal: Develop methods and tools to use I2-DSI's technology to replicate data from the Open Archives Initiative community
· Contact information: Ph.D. student Ryan Richardson (ryanr@vt.edu) and the instructor
· Required background: programming in PERL or Java, experience with a database package such as MySQL or Postgres.
· Description: The Open Archives Initiative is an organization that promotes interoperability among digital libraries and has created a protocol for servers to easily export their metadata to whoever requests it. One problem with this approach is that some of the more popular servers quickly become heavily loaded. The obvious solution is replication and the Internet-2 Distributed Storage Initiative has begun to develop technology for highly distributed transparent replication of servers.
This project is to develop support within the Internet-2 Distributed Storage Initiative (I2-DSI) framework for Open Archives Initiative (OAI) servers, thus enabling replication of dynamic data.
This could be done by developing code to replicate existing OAI archives, and incorporating this code into I2-DSI servers to create a new form of high-bandwidth channel. Since there are now about 30 Open Archives currently in existence, it should be possible to replicate several of them and make their metadata available on the same channel.
· Prior work: A project group in Spring 2001 established an I2-DSI channel on campus and made the Linux Mandrake distribution and CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, www.cpan.org) available over it. The team members were Matt Weber, Julia Lee, and Dzung T. Dang. See their project report..
· Students working on this: