Open Archives Initiative: Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE)

Possibly an important new standard for referring to a meaningful collection of material called a Resource Map... I note the interest in helping Web 2.0 apps to reference these, though not had time to figure out what they mean by this...

From the primer: "The ORE Model makes it possible to associate identities with aggregations of web resources and to describe their structure and semantics. It does this by introducing the Resource Map (ReM), which is a network accessible resource that encapsulates a set of RDF statements. These statements describe an Aggregation as a resource with a URI, enumerate the constituents of the Aggregation, and the relationships among those constituents."

Press Release:

"Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, web, library, and eScience community to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of online information resources. These aggregations, sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and video. The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. Although a motivating use case for the work is the changing nature of scholarship and scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support that scholarship, the intent of the effort is to develop standards that generalize across all web-based information including the increasing popular social networks of web 2.0

The beta version of the OAI-ORE specifications and implementation documents are released to the public on June 2, 2008. These documents describe a data model to introduce aggregations as resources with URIs on the web. They also detail the machine-readable descriptions of aggregations expressed in the popular Atom syndication format, RDF/XML, and RDFa.

The table of contents page with links to other documents is located at
http://www.openarchives.org/ore/toc

The full press release for this beta release is located at
http://www.openarchives.org/ore/documents/oreBetaPressRelease.pdf

Carl Lagoze - Cornell University
Herbert Van de Sompel - Los Alamos National Laboratory"