DigitalKoans

The Open Archives Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange project has released version 0.3 of the ORE Specification and User Guide.

Read more about it at "OAI-ORE Alpha Specifications Updated."

JISC is funding two projects to do small-scale OAI-ORE tests:

TheOREM (Theses with ORE Metadata), at the University of Cambridge, aims to:

• Test the applicability of the ORE standard in a realistic scholarly setting—thesis description, submission and publication.
• Demonstrate the advantages of the ORE approach in complex object publication, by combining it with existing web-standards compliant technologies.
• Provide examples to fully exercise the ORE specifications in order to provide validation and future direction.

FORESITE (Functional Object Reuse and Exchange: Supporting Information Topology Experiments) will create Resource Map descriptions of JSTOR's holdings, and then ingest them into the DSpace institutional repository system via the SWORD protocol, creating external references back to the original files. The description work will be automated, and the system for achieving this implemented at the University of Liverpool. The SWORD protocol will be implemented within DSpace by HP Labs along with other extensions necessary.

For further information, see the FORESITE proposal, A Preview of the TheOREM Project, and the TheOREM proposal.

Project reports from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2008 Research in Information Technology retreat are now available.

Here are selected project briefing reports:

• Fedora
• Open Archives Initiative-Object Reuse and Exchange
• OpenCollections
• Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research
• Sophie
• Visual Understanding Environment
• Zotero

Oskar Grenholm of the National Library of Sweden has released oreprovider, an open-source Java application that "will let you disseminate digital objects stored in a Fedora repository as OAI-ORE Resource Maps."

In the announcement, he says:

The idea behind it all is that you have a Java web application (oreprovider.war) that, on the fly, will generate Resource Maps serialized as Atom feeds (using OAI4J) for objects in Fedora. All you have to do in Fedora is to add information in RELS-EXT what datastreams belongs to which Resource Map (exactly how to do this can be seen at the projects web page).

The open source OAI4J software from the National Library of Sweden "can be used to harvest metadata from OAI-PMH compliant repositories. It can also be used to create new OAI-ORE Resource Maps from scratch, to parse existing ones and to serialize them to xml." You can download the client, which is written in Java, from SourceForge.

At a March 3rd meeting at the Johns Hopkins University, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) introduced the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) specifications. The ORE Specification and User Guide was released the prior day.

Here's an excerpt from the press release about the meeting:

The ORE specifications are developed in response to a significant challenge that has emerged in eScholarship. In contrast to the paper publications of traditional scholarship, or even their digital counterparts, the artifacts of eScholarship are complex aggregations. These aggregations consist of multiple resources with varying media types, semantics types, network locations, and intra- and inter-relationships. The future scholarly communication, research, and higher education infrastructure requires standardized approaches to identify, describe, and exchange these new outputs of scholarship.

The ORE specifications address this challenge with the ORE data model that defines how to associate an identifier, a URI, with aggregations of web resources. By referring to these identifiers, aggregations can then be linked to, cited, and described with metadata, in the same manner as any web resource. The ORE data model also makes it possible to describe the structure and semantics of these aggregations. The ORE specifications define how these descriptions can then be packaged in the XML-based Atom syndication format or in RDF/XML, making them available to a variety of applications.

In addition to their utility in eScholarship, the ORE specifications also apply to our everyday web use where we often encounter aggregations such as multi-page HTML documents, and collections of multi-format images on sites like flickr. OAI-ORE descriptions of these aggregations can be used to improve search engine behavior, provide input for browser-based navigation tools, and develop automated web services to analyze and preserve this information.

Read more about it at "The Vision of ORE."

The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange has released an alpha version of the ORE Specification and User Guide. Comments can be made on the OAI-ORE discussion group or via email to ore@openarchives.org.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

The World Wide Web is built upon the notion of atomic units of information called resources that are identified with URIs such as http://www.openarchives.org/ore/0.1/toc (this page). In addition to these atomic units, aggregations of resources are often units of information in their own right. . . .

A mechanism to associate identities with these aggregations and describe them in a machine-readable manner would make them visible to Web agents, both humans and machines. This could be useful for a number of applications and contexts. For example:

• Crawler-based search engines could use such descriptions to index information and provide search results sets at the granularity of the aggregations rather than their individual parts.
• Browsers could leverage them to provide users with navigation aids for the aggregated resources, in the same manner that machine-readable site maps provide navigation clues for crawlers.
• Other automated agents such as preservation systems could use these descriptions as guides to understand a "whole document" and determine the best preservation strategy.
• Systems that mine and analyze networked information for citation analysis/bibliometrics could achieve better accuracy with knowledge of aggregation structure contained in these descriptions.
• These machine-readable descriptions could provide the foundation for advanced scholarly communication systems that allow the flexible reuse and refactoring of rich scholarly artifacts and their components [Value Chains].

The Open Archives Initiative—Object Reuse and Exchange has released Compound Information Objects: An OAI-ORE Perspective by Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel.

Here’s an excerpt from the document’s "Introduction and Motivation" section:

In summary, the web architecture expresses the notion of linked URI-identified resources. Information systems can leverage this architecture to publish the components of a compound object and thereby make them available to web clients and services. But due to the absence of commonly accepted standards, the notion of an identified compound object with a distinct boundary and typed relationships among its component resources is lost.

The absence of these standards affects the functionality of a number of existing and possible web services and applications. Crawler-based search engines might be more useful if the granularity of their result sets corresponded to compound objects (a book or chapter, in this example) rather than individual resources (single pages). The ranking algorithms of these search engines might improve if the links among the components of a compound object were treated differently than links to the object as a whole, or if the number of in-links to the various component resources was accumulated to the level of the compound object instead of counted separately. Citation analysis systems would also benefit from a mechanism for citing the compound object itself, rather than arbitrary parts of the object. Finally, a standard for representing compound objects might enable a new class of "whole object" services such as "preserve a compound object".

In a previous posting, I discussed the Open Archives Initiative’s Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) project. ORE is worth watching closely.

Two new documents were released this January:

• "Report of the January 2007 ORE-TC Meeting," which is: "A detailed report of the results of the meeting of OAI-ORE Technical Committee describing features and requirements of the ORE model and its context in the Web Architecture."
• "Open Repositories 2007," which is: "A presentation describing OAI-ORE and progress based on the January 2007 ORE Technical Committee Meeting."