Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE)
This past week, a bunch of smart folks came out with a preliminary specification for integrating diverse scholarly digital objects across repositories. Check out the announcement here.
The Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) spec is, in my opinion, an enormous development. Scholarly technologists, librarians, and researchers have been circling around this idea of a truly semantic, services-based environment for a long time. It is great to see an architectural model that people can begin to discuss, rather than seeing more ad hoc development and tepid experiments by technology vendors.
The ORE working group describes their results like this:
“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 also recommend an Atom-based model for packaging and delivering these representations of digital objects via syndication:
“These specifications describe a data model to identify and describe aggregations of web resources, and the encoding of the data model in the XML-based Atom syndication format. ”
Incidentally, my forthcoming article, “Syndicating Rich Bibliographic Metadata Using MODS and RSS”, Journal of Web Librarianship, Vol. 2 Issue 1, 2008, explores some very similar ideas, but as a proof-of-concept exercise applied to objects in library collections. Either way, it is really exciting to see the same vein of investigation happening at a much more prominent level.
It is pretty clear to most everyone that the old model of digital repositories - silos of data waiting for serendipitous discovery - is played out. Dan Cohen says it much more eloquently than I can, but suffice it to say that technology is just beginning to allow digital scholarship to more closely model the actual process of scholarship, in all of its complexity, nuance, and imprecision. It is pretty awesome.