CERN Accelerating science

YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, blogs, message boards and other "Web 2.0" related technologies are indicative of the contemporary web experience. There is a growing interest in appropriating these tools and modalities to support the scholarly communication process. This begins with leveraging the intrinsic value of scholarly digital objects beyond the borders of the hosting repository. There are numerous examples of the need to re-use objects across repositories in scholarly communication. These include citation, preservation, virtual collections of distributed objects, and the progression of units of scholarly communication through the registration-certification-awareness-archiving chain. The last several years have brought about numerous open source repository systems and their associated communities. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) has been the initial catalyst for repository interoperability. However, there is now a rising interest in repositories no longer being static components in a scholarly communication system that merely archive digital objects deposited by scholars. Rather, they can become building blocks of a global scholarly communication federation in which each individual digital object can be the ore that fuels a variety of applications. Both the interest in this type of federation, and the insights gained thus far are sufficiently strong to move beyond prototypes and to support an effort to formally specify this next level of interoperability across repositories. Through the support of the Mellon Foundation, a two-year international initiative to define this interoperability fabric has started in October 2006. The effort is in the context of the Open Archives Initiative, and is named Object Re-Use and Exchange (ORE). OAI-ORE is intended to be a complement to OAI-PMH. OAI-ORE is coordinated by Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel, and consists of international experts on Advisory, Technical and Liaison Committees. The Technical Committee held its first meeting in January 2007 and began its initial work to develop, identify, and profile extensible standards and protocols to allow repositories, agents, and services to interoperate in the context of use and reuse of compound digital objects beyond the boundaries of the holding repositories. In this presentation, we will give an overview of the current activities, including: defining the problem of compound documents within the web architecture, enumerating and exploring several use cases, and identifying likely adopters of OAI-ORE. More information about ORE can be found at: http://www.openarchives.org/.

View Herbert Van De Sompel's biography