Open access to scholarly materials is increasing due to the deployment of institutional repositories based on Fedora, Dspace, ePrints, and other software platforms. In addition, interest in so-called "data driven scholarship" has led to scholarly artifacts, the constituents of these repositories, that are increasingly complex. Rather than being simply text-based, they combine text, data, simulations, and multimedia bound together via relationships such as workflow, provenance, and citations.
The opportunity thus exists to create a networked scholarly communication system supporting new forms of recombination and dissemination of scholarly artifacts. This new paradigm requires a shared resource-based, rather than metadata-based, interoperability layer that supports access, reuse, and deposit of these objects. Through the support of the Mellon Foundation, a two-year international initiative to define this interoperability fabric began in October 2006. The effort is conducted under the umbrella of the OAI (Open Archives Initiative), is named ORE (Object Re-Use & Exchange), and is coordinated by Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel. This talk will describe the results thus far of this project, which include the preliminary definition of a complex document model layered over the web architecture.
Carl Lagoze is a Senior Research Associate in Computing and Information Science at Cornell. In this role he teaches and leads research in a number of NSF and Mellon funded projects. His primary research interests include architecture and protocols for distributed information environments, automatic organization of web information, and new environments for scholarly communication. In research collaborations with colleagues at Cornell and elsewhere he has played a major role in the Open Archives Initiative for Metadata Harvesting, the Dienst/NCSTRL architecture and protocol for distributed digital libraries, the ABC metadata ontology, and the Fedora Open Source Repository System. His current focus is on the Mellon-funded OAI Object Reuse and Exchange Project.
