for Carl Lagoze -

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Apologies for Cross Posting:

Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative
<http://www.openarchives.org/>  (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and
Exchange <http://www.openarchives.org/ore/>  (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 ³web 2.0².

The beta version of the OAI-ORE specifications and implementation documents
<http://www.openarchives.org/ore/0.9/toc>  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.

The table of contents page with links to the following other documents is
located at http://www.openarchives.org/ore/toc
<http://www.openarchives.org/ore/0.9/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