Beta Release of ORE Specifications and User Guides

Forwarding on behalf of Carl Lagoze & Herbert Van de Sompel:

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 .

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