MOAI Server 1.1.0 Released

Infrae is pleased to announce the release of version 1.1.0 of the MOAI Server. MOAI is a platform that aggregates input from disparate sources and republishes it via the Open Archive Initiatives protocol for metadata harvesting. MOAI is built for institutional repositories that store relational metadata and asset files.

MOAI is open source software, released under a BSD license. For complete technical information see the MOAI site: http://moai.infrae.com/.

New features

The most notable feature of this release is the addition of a new feed configuration option called ‘deleted_sets’. If a set is added to the deleted_sets list, all the records that are in that set will automatically be marked as ‘deleted’.

Consider the following scenario: a MOAI server contains two feeds. One feed consists of all records that are in the set ‘private’, the other feed consists of all records except the ones that are in ‘private’. This is accomplished by adding ‘private’ to the disallowed and allowed set lists. If the ‘private’ set is added to a record, it will automatically appear in the ‘private’ feed, and will disappear from the other feed. However, there is a problem that the other feed is now missing the record and there is no deleted record, so harvesting clients do not know that the record should be removed. A solution to this problem is to add the set ‘private’ not to the ‘disallowed sets list’, but to the ‘deleted sets list’. The private records will then still be part of the feed, but they will be set to ‘deleted’, which means that the metadata will not be visible, but harvesting clients know that the publication has been deleted.

Other changes are that the records are now sorted descending by timestamp instead of ascending by id, how it was before. Also ranged byte requests for asset downloads are not supported anymore since they failed sometimes when using Acrobat plugin on windows. 

Sponsor

This release was sponsored by the CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands: http://www.cwi.nl/.

What is the MOAI Server?

MOAI is an open access server platform for institutional repositories. The server aggregates content from disparate sources, transforms it, stores it in a database, and (re)publishes the content, in one or many OAI feeds. Each feed has its own configuration.

The server has a flexible system for combining records into sets and uses these sets in the feed configuration. MOAI also comes with a simple yet flexible authentication scheme that can easily be customized. Besides providing authentication for the feeds, the authentication also controls access to the assets.

MOAI is a standalone system that can be used in combination with any repository software that comes with an OAI feed such as Fedora Commons, EPrints or DSpace. It can also be used directly with an SQL database or just a folder of XML files.

Interaction with other systems and websites

Feeds from MOAI can be picked up by any system or search engine that understands OAI metadata. If the system is a content management system and has harvesting capabilities, the feed data can be stored, presented, and searched within a website. Silva, a powerful CMS for organizations that manage complex sites, has OAI Pack extensions that provide these capabilities. The Silva CMS is also an open source product, see https://infrae.com/products/silva.

Download

The MOAI software is on the PyPi site: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/MOAI.

It’s also available at: https://dist.infrae.com/download/MOAI.

A buildout is the easiest way to install MOAI; read an explanation.

Resources

Documentation site: http://moai.infrae.com/

Mailing list: subscribe to the MOAI developers list at https://lists.infrae.com/mailman/listinfo/moai-dev

Source code repository: https://svn.infrae.com/MOAI/

Contact

FMI contact info at infrae com, +31 10 243 7051.