Introduction

CDS/ISIS is an Integrated Storage and Information retrieval System of UNESCO, which is widely used in Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), AGRIS Network and other organizations especially in developing countries. FAO in collaboration with Associazione per la documentazione le biblioteche e gli archivi (DBA), Italy, worked together to ensure dynamically exposing of metadata repositories content from the CDS/ISIS Web applications to the Open Archives Initiative (OAI framework).

A software layer (ISISOAI) was created as mediator between a generic structured CDS/ISIS database with associated links to digital documents (at data provider site) accessible on the Internet and a harvester (at the service provider site), based on OAI-PMH protocol. It is an Open source Java Servlet which is an extension of OAICat (OCLC) application, adapted for use with WWW-ISIS and wxis software applications that can further be adapted for accessing repositories stored as an XML file or in RDBMS.

This is a very important step not only for improving the whole harvesting process to the AGRIS central XML repository by cutting E-mails and overloads, but also it is a step torward creation of new value-added services based on the shared information, compliant with the common standards. In this experiment we kept both possible standard representations of metadata: AGRIS AP, exchanged within the AGRIS community and Simple DC XML format metadata for extending its use beyond the AGRIS community (OAISter, BASE etc.). The respective mapping tables for the AGRIS AP and Simple DC are available.

The results of the work were presented as a poster at the 5th OAI Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland 18-20 April 2007 as well as described in a paper accepted to be published in The Electronic Library journal. A presentation is also available at OAI-Plug Presentation.

After packaging and documentation, the plug-in has been installed in some pilot centers for testing and is available for any CDS/ISIS Web based application databases to ensure their OAI compliancy.

Download the OAI Plug-In

The installation kit is available at the FAO FTP site or can be received on CD-ROM on request. We recommend that you read the readme.txt file associated with the Installation package before you download the OAI plug-in.



It includes the four components needed:

1. Java 1.5.0 java development kit ( jdk1.5)
2. Apache Tomcat
3. oaiagris plug-in:
   • For the English version of WEBAGRIS download the file oaiagris.zip and webpages.zip files in a directory in your PC.
     
      
   • For Spanish version of WEBAGRIS download the file oaiagris.zip and webpages_sp.zip files in a directory in your PC.
4. WEBAGRIS Adaptation

Note: In case you have already installed Java development kit and Apache Tomcat you should go directly start from component 3. “oaiagris plug-in”.



The installation instructions are available in the WebAGRIS OAI Plug-in Technical Manual.