I'm very pleased to be able to share news of this milestone in
the Open Archives Object Reuse and Exchange program with CNI-announce
readers.
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, in RDF/XML, and RDFa.