OAI’s Object Reuse and Exchange Initiative

The Open Archives Initiative has announced its Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) initiative:

Object Reuse and Exchange (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. . . . its real importance lies in the potential for these distributed repositories and their contained objects to act as the foundation of a new digitally-based scholarly communication framework. Such a framework would permit fluid reuse, refactoring, and aggregation of scholarly digital objects and their constituent parts—including text, images, data, and software. This framework would include new forms of citation, allow the creation of virtual collections of objects regardless of their location, and facilitate new workflows that add value to scholarly objects by distributed registration, certification, peer review, and preservation services. Although scholarly communication is the motivating application, we imagine that the specifications developed by ORE may extend to other domains.

OAI-ORE is being funded my the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a two-year period.

Presentations from the Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories meeting are a good source of further information about the thinking behind the initiative as is the "Pathways: Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories" preprint.