Using OAI-PMH with Google Sitemaps

9/20/2005 10:53:00 AM

Posted by Vanessa Fox

If your site uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) 2.0 protocol, an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting, you can use your OAI repository as your Sitemap.

Simply submit the baseURL of your OAI repository (for instance, http://www.example.com/oaiserver). When we query the baseURL, we automatically add query parameters (such as ?verb=Identify or ?verb=ListRecords), so you can simply submit the baseURL itself. When we extract the URLs for your site, we expect the records in the repository to be formatted using Dublin Core, with the URLs embedded in <dc:identifier> tags. Below is a sample record that includes the <dc:identifier> tag in bold. The URL listed in that tag is what we extract.

<oai_dc:dc
 xmlns:oai_dc="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc/"
 xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc/
 http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc.xsd">
<dc:title xml:lang="en">A title of extraordinary things</dc:title>
<dc:creator>McCormack, Michael</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>LCSH:Ausdehnungslehre; LCCN QA205.H99; Greatness:Amanda</dc:subject>
<dc:publisher>J. Wiley & Sons</dc:publisher>
<dc:date>Created: 1906; Available: 1991</dc:date>
<dc:type>text</dc:type>
<dc:identifier>http://example.com/physics/1796949</dc:identifier>
<dc:language>english</dc:language>
<dc:rights xml:lang="en">Public Domain</dc:rights>
</oai_dc:dc>

As with other Sitemaps, the URLs must be within the same site and at the same directory location or lower than the baseURL. For instance, if you submit http://www.example.com/oaiserver as the baseURL, the following URLs would be valid:

http://www.example.com/
http://www.example.com/samples.html
http://www.example.com/images/

However, if you submit http://www.example.com/dataprovider/oaiserver, then none of those URLs would be valid.