Jangle feeds and deleted records

[Ross Singer]

Hi everybody.

Currently Jangle has no capacity to deal with resources removed or
deleted from a particular entity (Actors, Resources, Collections,
Items), because that's not explicitly baked into generic Atom.

At the DLF ILS-DI BDI (#code4lib's @ana command returns "Fill did bid"
for that), the requirement was laid out that to fully comply with the
HarvestBibliographicRecords and HarvestExpandedRecords methods, a
server must be able to issue OAI-PMH deleted record responses.

This, of course, is a generally useful idea, anyway. So in the
context of Jangle, I propose the introduction of "Tombstones"
(http://www.tools.ietf.org/html/draft-snell-atompub-tombstones-05),
which, while still a draft proposal, are the best representation of
"removal" of resources at a particular URI.

Whether or not your actual Jangle implementation supports this is a
local decision, I'm just proposing the inclusion of this in the spec
to define deleted resources.

Thoughts?
-Ross.

[Ross Singer]

Ok, don't everybody comment at once on this idea.

It just occurred to me, as I was trying to figure out how to actually
implement this in the OpenBiblio connector, that, in order for it to
work, we'd need some way to express this in JSON.

Right now the JSON responses are a little ad-hoc, quasi-resembling
Atom feeds, but not exactly.

Obviously it would make more sense to formally nail down an extensible
JSON "schema" for responses.

Also, since I'm pretty much solely responsible for the current state
of affairs, I would like some input from you all to avoid making more
of the same mistakes.

If anybody wants to throw out ideas or similar, existing projects that
work, please do. Otherwise I'll start sending strawman proposals to
the list and see if anybody has strong opinions on anything.

Thanks,
-Ross.