Applying SOAP to OAI-PMH

The Web Services paradigm for distributed computing promises to provide a breakthrough in interoperability by defining standardised mechanisms for inter-process communication. The SOAP standard, in particular, is widely discussed but not as widely adopted by standards bodies. The OAI is one such organisation that has been criticised for not adopting SOAP. Since the OAI-PMH is driven by semantics and SOAP describes syntax, a merger of the two technologies seems natural and inevitable. This paper discusses an attempt to remodel and repackage the OAI-PMH as a layer over SOAP and implement an end-to-end solution based on this experimental protocol. The project highlighted important concerns, such as the relative efficiency of layering in structured textual data and the problem of moving standards. The results show that few compromises are needed for a move to SOAP provided that protocol design is appropriately abstracted, and this has far reaching implications for the adoption of SOAP and Web Services within the DL community and OAI in particular.