The first production version of the Object Reuse and Exchange from the Open Archives Initiative was published today. In the words of the release announcement, ORE provides “the foundation for applications and services that can visualize, preserve, transfer, summarize, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their daily Web interaction: including multiple page Web documents, multiple format documents in institutional repositories, scholarly data sets, and online photo and music collections.”

This release of the 1.0 version features a newly rewritten primer as well as updated user guides (Resource Map Implementation in Atom, Resource Map Implementation in RDF/XML, Resource Map Implementation in RDFa, HTTP Implementation, and Resource Map Discovery) and core specifications (Abstract Data Model and ORE Vocabulary). There are also Tools and Additional Resources, an ORE Google Group and a ORE Wiki.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://foresite.cheshire3.org/wiki/ on January 28th, 2011.

Last Friday, Herbert Van de Sompel posted a message to various mailing lists about a proposed revision to the serialization of OAI-ORE into Atom. The proposal by Michael Nelson, Robert Sanderson, and Herbert has two key components:

• To express an ORE Aggregation at the level of an Atom Entry, rather than (as in the current draft) at the level of an Atom Feed
• To convey ORE-specific relationships types using add-ons/extensions, rather than by making ORE-specific interpretations of pre-existing Atom relationship types

Here is the text of Herbert’s message:

Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:16:24 -0600
From: Herbert Van de Sompel <herbertv@lanl.gov>
Subject: Proposal to revise ORE Atom serialization

As a result of feedback that was provided over the past few weeks, both via the ORE Google list, in private communications, and via the blogosphere, we have made a bold move to compile a Discussion Document that outlines a proposal for a significantly different ORE Atom serialization.

The Discussion Document is at <http://www.openarchives.org/ore/documents/atom_revision_20080801.html>.

We understand this proposal comes very late in the ORE process that is expected to deliver 1.0 specification by the end of September 2008. Your feedback to this proposal is absolutely crucial. Please use the ORE Google Group (http://groups.google.com/group/oai-ore) to share your insights.

Thanks! Greetings.

Herbert Van de Sompel

Comments to this blog entry are closed since they are best redirected to the Google Groups list.

Carl Lagoze of Cornell University and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory announced the release of the beta form of the ORE specifications yesterday. Here is the full text of their announcement:

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.

A forum for feedback on this beta release is at http://groups.google.com/group/oai-ore. This feedback and further consultation with the OAI-ORE community will be considered in the evolution of this beta release to a production release scheduled for September 2008.

Ben O’Steen has some comments about the differences between the last alpha and this beta. I haven’t had a chance to go through this version yet, but hope to next week.

As a result of discussions coming from the OAI-ORE open meeting in Baltimore in the first week of March, the document editors released a new version of the ORE alpha specifications (labeled “0.3″) earlier this month to coincide with the open meeting at Southampton, UK. In a message to the technical committee, Herbert Van de Sompel summarized the changes as:

• Data Model: changes in the relationship between Resource Map and Aggregation; introduction of a solution regarding the reference in context; revised approach regarding nesting aggregations.
• Atom serialization: Significant revision of the mapping from the ORE Model to Atom.
• Introduction of an ORE Primer (formerly called the data model overview)
• Introduction of a document describing implementation issues regarding HTTP URIs for Aggregations and Resource Maps.
• RDF serialization document: This document was first made available in alpha 0.2. It deals with RDF/XML but also RDFa that can, for example be used, in splash pages.

Comments are still welcome, and the OAI-ORE discussion list has been quite active the past few weeks. The document editors are aiming for a beta release of the specification in mid-May.