After an extensive process of vetting and experimentation, the first production release of the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications are now available. The press release from Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel reproduced below gives the details; the materials are all at www.openarchives.org. I think that these are going to be an important tool for a number of different application areas. We'll be having coverage of this work at the fall CNI member meeting.

Clifford Lynch

Director, CNI

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Over the past two years the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, web, library, repository, and eScience communities to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of Web resources.   These standards provide the foundation for applications and services that can visualize, preserve, transfer, summarize, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their daily Web interaction: including multiple page Web documents, multiple format documents in institutional repositories, scholarly data sets, and online photo and music collections.   The OAI-ORE standards leverage the core Web architecture and concepts emerging from related efforts including the semantic web, linked data, and Atom syndication.  As a result, they integrate both with the emerging machine-readable web, Web 2.0, and the future evolution of networked information.

The production versions of the OAI-ORE specifications and implementation documents are now available to the public, with a table of contents page at http://www.openarchives.org/ore/toc.  This public release is the culmination of several months of testing and review of initial alpha and beta releases. The participation and feedback from the wider OAI-ORE community, especially the OAI-ORE technical committee, was instrumental to the process leading up to this production release.

The documents in the release 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.  The documents included in the release are:

 ·       ORE User Guide Documents

o   Primer

o   Resource Map Implementation in Atom

o   Resource Map Implementation in RDF/XML

o   Resource Map Implementation in RDFa

o   HTTP Implementation

o   Resource Map Discovery

·       ORE Specification Documents

o   Abstract Data Model

o   Vocabulary

·       Tools and Additional Resources

Carl Lagoze - Cornell University - lagoze@cs.cornell.edu