NicNames is (now) OAI-PMH compliant

A short time ago, the Australian Research Data Commons Party Infrastructure Project (ARDCPIP) met for the first time by teleconference. Among other things, we discussed how the NicNames software might be able to help with the process of managing researcher names in the data curation environment. Previously the NicNames software didn't support OAI-PMH for information exchange. This was discussed at the teleconference as a very useful enhancement for the software in assisting with building capability for the People Australia party ID in the research sector.

NicNames software developer Thomas Rutter reports that the NicNames tool has been updated to bring OAI-PMH support and reporting of deletions in all harvests. The addition of OAI-PMH as a harvesting protocol provides instant compatibility between NicNames and a huge range of existing metadata harvesting services. OAI-PMH for NicNames includes full support for deletions, and metadata is available both in OAI's simplified Dublin Core format and the richer, native NicNames XML format.

New support for OAI-PMH complements the harvesting support already available in the NicNames native API, which has some additional, OAI-PMH incompatible features such as harvesting based on keywords. Both have now been updated to fully support deletions, preventing the need for a full harvest to be conducted in order to discover deleted records.

The updated version of the NicNames software (0.4) can now be downloaded from https://launchpad.net/nicnames/