OAI-ORE

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OAI-ORE: Object Reuse and Exchange

A new initiative by the OAI team (including Herbert van de Sompel and Carl Lagoze) has just been funded by Mellon in the USA. Further information available from <http://www.openarchives.org/ore/>

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Overview

ORE will develop specifications that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their constituent digital objects. These specifications will include approaches for representing digital objects and repository services that facilitate access and ingest of these representations. The specifications will enable development of a new generation of cross-repository services that leverage the intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of hosting repositories. From Press Release: Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) will develop specifications that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their constituent digital objects. These specifications will include approaches for representing digital objects and repository services that facilitate access and ingest of these representations. The specifications will enable a new generation of cross-repository services that leverage the intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of hosting repositories.

The goals of ORE are inspired by advances in scholarly communication and the growth of scholarly material that is available in scholarly repositories including institutional repositories, discipline-oriented repositories, dataset warehouses, and online journal repositories. This growth is significant by itself. However, its real importance lies in the potential for these distributed repositories and their contained objects to act as the foundation of a new digitally-based scholarly communication framework. Such a framework would permit fluid reuse, refactoring, and aggregation of scholarly digital objects and their constituent parts - including text, images, data, and software. This framework would include new forms of citation, allow the creation of virtual collections of objects regardless of their location, and facilitate new workflows that add value to scholarly objects by distributed registration, certification, peer review, and preservation services. Although scholarly communication is the motivating application, we imagine that the specifications developed by ORE may extend to other domains.

ORE is funded by Mellon for two years beginning October 2006. It is coordinated by Carl Lagoze of Cornell University Information Science and Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos Research Library. The ORE two-year work plan includes:

  • Formation of an international advisory committee , consisting of leaders in e-Science, institutional repositories, publishing, library, and educational technology communities.
  • Formation of an international working group that will meet over the two year period and develop the set of ORE specifications (membership to be announced).
  • Establishment and management of an experimental deployment community that will exercise the developed standards in a variety of contexts.
  • Establishment of a sustainable community to support the widespread deployment and management of the standards fabric.

OAI-ORE will co-exist within the Open Archives Initiative with the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), the widely deployed standard for exchange of metadata. We expect that the naturally more expressive digital object focus of OAI-ORE will complement the narrower metadata focus of OAI-PMH. OAI-ORE will benefit from the interoperability experience and depth of the international OAI community.

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Workplan

Following the model used to develop the OAI-PMH, the components in the project proposal are:

  1. The formation and management of an international working group to develop a set of specifications for the Repositories Interoperability Framework. These specifications will describe common data models and interfaces for exchange of information based on these data models.
  2. The establishment and management of an experimental deployment community that will exercise the interoperability fabric in a variety of milieus, with the goal of empirically proving the interoperability fabric before wide-scale deployment efforts.
  3. The establishment of a sustainable community to support the widespread deployment and management of the standards fabric, and thereby make real and substantial changes in the scholarly communication system
  4. The development and publication of reference implementations of the standards built upon common repository packages such as aDORe, DSpace, ePrints, and Fedora. These implementations will be made available on the project web page as Open Source software under the terms of the Educational Community License.
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Project outputs

A white paper describing the web-centric OAI-ORE perspective on compound information objects is now available. This document is a work in progress and was used as a discussion document in preparation of the May 2007 meeting of the OAI-ORE Technical Committee.

More at http://www.openarchives.org/ore/

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