RfC: New Open Archives Standard for the Description and Exchange of Aggregations of Web Resources (OAI-ORE)

Hi all,

the Open Archives Initiative (http://www.openarchives.org/) develops and
promotes interoperability standards for digital content repositories. The
Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is widely used 
within
the scholarly communication and digital libraries communities to exchange
meta-information about digital content between repositories.

The Open Archives Initiative currently works on a new standard that aims at
aligning content repositories closer with the general architecture of the 
Web
Wide Web (AWWW).  The new Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) standard
provides for the description of aggregations of Web resources and allows
generic Web clients as well as search engines to access these descriptions
according to the Web architecture.

The new standard relies on the RDF data model, dereferencable URIs according
to the Linked Data principles, RDF/XML and ATOM as serialization formats and
reuses Dublin Core vocabulary terms. Once it is deployed, it will extend the
Semantic Web with meta-information about billions of digital items.

The alpha versions of the specifications are found here:

http://www.openarchives.org/ore/0.1/toc

The Open Archives Initiative asks for comments on the specifications. As the
specifications rely heavily on Semantic Web technologies and as they are
likely to have a huge practical impact within the digital libraries
communities, I think it would be great if people from the Semantic Web
community would have a look at the specs and provide additional input to the
OAI folks. There also seam to be overlappings between OAI-ORE and the
current work of the W3C POWDER working group
(http://www.w3.org/2007/02/powder_charter).

Please send comments on the spec to the new OAI-ORE forum at Google groups:

http://groups.google.com/group/oai-ore

Nice to see Semantic Web technologies being adopted by another community :-)

Cheers

Chris


--
Chris Bizer
Freie Universität Berlin
+49 30 838 54057
chris@bizer.de
www.bizer.de

Received on Thursday, 13 December 2007 10:09:12 UTC