I wanted to share (somewhat belatedly; my apologies for the delay) this announcement from Herbert van de Sompel about the availability of a draft specification for public comment from the joint Open Archives Initiative/NISO ResourceSynch effort. This is an extremely ambitious project that takes on an important but highly challenging problem, and thus it's particularly important that it get wide public review and comment.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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Call for feedback to the ResourceSync specification for
synchronization of web resources
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A draft ResourceSync specification is now available at
http://www.openarchives.org/rs/. Feedback to this version of the
specification is solicited and can be shared by March 15th 2013 on the
ResourceSync Google Group [1]. Group discussions are openly
accessible; posting requires group membership.

The ResourceSync specification describes a synchronization framework
for the web that consists of various capabilities that allow third
party systems to remain synchronized with a server's evolving
resources. The capabilities may be combined in a modular manner to
meet local or community requirements. The specification also describes
how a server can advertise the synchronization capabilities it
supports and how third party systems can discover this information.
The document formats used in the synchronization framework are based
on the widely adopted Sitemap protocol.

Recent papers provide background information about the ResourceSync
effort: [2] describes a perspective on the resource synchronization
problem, [3] gives a high-level technical overview of the proposed
solution, and [4] enumerates classes of use cases.

ResourceSync is a collaboration between the National Information
Standardization Organization (NISO) [5] and the Open Archives
Initiative (OAI) [6]. It is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
[7] and Jisc [8].

The editors of the specification are affiliated with the Los Alamos
National Laboratory, Cornell University, Old Dominion University, and
the University of Michigan. They have been involved in other
interoperability specification efforts, including the OAI Protocol for
Metadata Harvesting, OAI Object Reuse and Exchange, Memento, and Open
Annotation. An international Technical Committee has supported the
editors in compiling the draft specification.

Herbert Van de Sompel, on behalf of the NISO/OAI ResourceSync effort

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/resourcesync
[2] http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/september2012-vandesompel
[3] http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/january2013-klein
[4] http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue70/lewis-et-al
[5] http://niso.org
[6] http://www.openarchives.org
[7] http://www.sloan.org/
[8] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/