I · 09

Community Profiles

A Community Profile is a registered selection of OpenURL components for one community. SAP1 is the profile behind scholarly linking.

The OpenURL Framework is deliberately general. A community that wants to use it selects specific Registry entries (one ContextObject Format, plus Metadata Formats, Namespaces, Character Encodings and Transports) and registers that selection as a Community Profile. Resolvers and sources can then claim conformance to the profile.

What a profile lists

  • Exactly one ContextObject Format (KEV or XML), which implies a serialization and a constraint language.
  • The Metadata Formats that may be used for By-Value or By-Reference metadata.
  • The identifier Namespaces that may be used.
  • The Character Encodings.
  • One or more Transports.

Nothing in a ContextObject says which profile it follows. Profiles are a benchmark for conformance claims, for example in procurement, not a runtime switch.

SAP1: San Antonio Level 1 Community Profile

Identifier info:ofi/pro:sap1-2004, described in Appendix C of the standard. SAP1 serves the scholarly-information community and selects:

  • ContextObject Format: KEV (info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx).
  • Character Encodings: UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1.
  • Metadata Formats: journal, book, dissertation, patent and sch_svc (scholarly ServiceTypes).
  • Namespaces: http, https, ftp, ldap, mailto, urn:ISBN, urn:ISSN, urn:NBN, and the info namespaces doi, hdl, bibcode, pmid, oai, sici, oclcnum, lccn and sid.
  • Transports: Inline, By-Value and By-Reference OpenURL over HTTP.

The appendix notes that including the Inline transport gives "an elegant migration path" from OpenURL 0.1. In practice, scholarly OpenURLs are SAP1 ContextObjects sent Inline over HTTP(S) GET. The KEV guidelines add that a SAP1-compliant resolver should resolve whatever SAP1 namespaces and formats it can and "handle gracefully" the ones it cannot.

SAP2: San Antonio Level 2 Community Profile

Identifier info:ofi/pro:sap2-2004, described in Appendix D. SAP2 is built on the XML ContextObject Format. It selects the XML versions of the journal, book, dissertation, patent and sch_svc formats plus OAI Dublin Core (oai_dc) and MARCXML (MARC21), the same namespaces as SAP1, and the By-Value and By-Reference transports. It is mostly seen in machine-to-machine and research settings.

Other registered profiles

info:ofi/pro:dccp-2004 — Dublin Core Community Profile
Registered by NISO Committee AX. KEV-based, using the KEV Dublin Core format info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dc. See Dublin Core (KEV).
info:ofi/pro:canonical_cit — Canonical Citation Community Profile
Registered in 2011 by David Ruddy (Cornell University Library) for citing a work, or a passage within it, independently of any edition or translation, as is usual for classical texts.
info:ofi/pro:rtm-2007 and rtm-200908 — Request Transfer Message
Registered by OCLC PICA for transferring requests (for example interlibrary-loan requests) as XML ContextObjects, with their own Referent, Requester and ServiceType schemas.

The Registry also lists undated aliases info:ofi/pro:sap1, sap2 and dccp.

Choosing a profile in practice

  • Emit KEV ContextObjects with ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004, an rft_val_fmt, and an rft_id or rft.* metadata (or both).
  • Send them Inline over HTTP(S) GET with url_ver=Z39.88-2004.
  • Stick to the journal, book, dissertation and patent formats for scholarly material, and identify the source with rfr_id=info:sid/….

Sources