Registration of "oai:" URI scheme?

[Mark A. Matienzo]

Hi all, 

I was surprised to discover the "oai:" URI scheme used for OAI-PMH identifiers was not registered as a URI scheme in the IANA registry. [0] I see that that there was a previously a thread about the possibility of registration on the W3C URI list from 2002. [1] 

Version 00 of the Internet-Draft for the info: URI scheme referenced an example with an "info:oai" prefix [2], but that example didn't seem to make its way to RFC 4452. [3]

Is there any chance the registration process for the "oai:" scheme was started, or is there some sort of canonical way to represent "oai:"-schemed URIs in the context of another URI scheme? As far as I can tell, the OAI-PMH identifier specification does not provide any specific guidance about this. [4] 

[0] http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri-schemes.xhtml

[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2002May/0019.html

[2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandesompel-info-uri-00#section-5.3

[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4452

[4] http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-oai-identifier.htm

Mark A. Matienzo <ma...@matienzo.org>

Director of Technology, Digital Public Library of America

http://dp.la/

[Herbert Van de Sompel]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 1:08 PM, Mark A. Matienzo
<mark.m...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was surprised to discover the "oai:" URI scheme used for OAI-PMH
> identifiers was not registered as a URI scheme in the IANA registry. [0] I
> see that that there was a previously a thread about the possibility of
> registration on the W3C URI list from 2002. [1]
>

You are right, Mark, the OAI scheme was never registered. I guess the
OAI-PMH people ran out of energy ;-) It's not all that surprising, on
the other hand. For example, the DOI scheme is not registered either,
yet the syntax doi:.... is frequently used e.g. in citations.

> Version 00 of the Internet-Draft for the info: URI scheme referenced an
> example with an "info:oai" prefix [2], but that example didn't seem to make
> its way to RFC 4452. [3]
>

And it's not in the info URI registry either, see
http://info-uri.info/registry/OAIHandler?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
I remember the reason being that we did not want two different
syntaxes to express an OAI identifier.

> Is there any chance the registration process for the "oai:" scheme was
> started, or is there some sort of canonical way to represent "oai:"-schemed
> URIs in the context of another URI scheme? As far as I can tell, the OAI-PMH
> identifier specification does not provide any specific guidance about this.
> [4]
>

The OAI identifier is commonly expressed according to the syntax [4].
Which is well specified but not registered as a URI scheme. One could
make an attempt to register it, but let's just say that I have seen
some reluctance/opposition to allowing new URI schemes. Not that it's
impossible at all, but typically it involves some work.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have ideas/suggestion re
how to proceed.

Cheers

Herbert

> [0] http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri-schemes.xhtml
> [1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2002May/0019.html
> [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandesompel-info-uri-00#section-5.3
> [3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4452
> [4] http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-oai-identifier.htm
>
> Mark A. Matienzo <ma...@matienzo.org>
> Director of Technology, Digital Public Library of America
> http://dp.la/
>

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--
Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Research & Prototyping
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library
http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/

==