The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE)

Abstract

The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) is a new collaborative international initiative, funded for the next 2 years by the Mellon Foundation, focusing on an interoperability framework for the exchange of information about Digital Objects between cooperating repositories, registries and services. The initiative's web site is available at http://openarchives.org/ore.

A primary aim of the OAI-ORE is to support the creation, management and dissemination of the new forms of composite digital resources being produced by eResearch and eScholarship (i.e., multi-part, multi-media, distributed and service-oriented rather than single file-based objects). As more scientific communities begin to publish their raw data sets, experimental details, analytical methods and visualisations, in addition to the traditional scholarly publications - the problem of describing such compound objects for exchange and re-use will become critical. It is the aim of OAI-ORE to extend the work of OAI-PMH to support the metadata requirements for the exchange and re-use of such complex resources.

This paper will present an overview of the OAI-ORE, its aims and objectives, workplan and current and anticipated deliverables. It will also demonstrate the applicability of OAI-ORE to eResearch through a number of case studies that involve the generation, analysis, re-use and exchange of compound digital objects within scientific disciplines. Show more