[Rolf Krahl]

Hi Folks,
as discussed in yesterday’s meeting I want to send some informations
on ICAT and the plans to add support for OAI-PMH to the list.
ICAT is a metadata catalogue and related components to support Large
Facility experimental data [1]. The components include:
* ICAT, the metadata catalogue itself, providing SOAP and RESTful web
service interfaces to access the metadata,
* IDS, the ICAT Data Service which provides a uniform interface to
the data catalogued by ICAT, and
* TopCAT, a web based GUI.
ICAT is developed in a collaboration of photon and neutron source
facilities. It is mostly used at the participating facilities,
although the product by itself is rather generic and is in no way
specific to this community.
At the last ICAT project F2F meeting in October, I presented a
proposal to add support for the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for
Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to ICAT [2]. Technically, the idea
would be to implement an OAI-PMH connector as a new separate component
that serves harvesting requests and contacts ICAT as a client in order
compile the responses.
The main goal would be to achieve OpenAIRE Compliance with ICAT, see
[3] for details. This would add a significant convenience for users
that receive an EU grant and need to reference the results in our
repositories in their reports to EC. But of course, once we have this
component, it can be used for all kinds of metadata harvesting of our
repositories.
We hope to have a first version available by next year. This would
fit in the scope of the WG as an example for Use Case 2 in the primer
document.
[1]: https://icatproject.org/
[2]: Slides from the ICAT project F2F meeting:
https://icatproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/oai-pmh.pdf
[3]: OpenAIRE Guidelines for Data Archives:
https://guidelines.openaire.eu/en/latest/data/index.html
—
Rolf Krahl
Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB)
Albert-Einstein-Str. 15, 12489 Berlin
Tel.: +49 30 8062 12122

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