Post on behalf of Carl Lagoze <[log in to unmask]> ...

~Tim


Apologies for Cross Posting:


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.

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