A panel discussion about the Open Archives Initiative Object Re-use and Exchange (ORE) was chaired by Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information. Panelists included Michael Nelson, Old Dominion University, Neil Jacobs, Joint Information Systems (JISC) UK, and Carl Lagoze, Cornell University on June 20 at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Vancouver.

Carl Lagoze speaking with an attendee at the “The OAI-ORE Effort: Progress, Challenges, Synergies” panel discussion.

“Some people were very concerned about inter-repository exchange of complex objects. Others were more concerned about common interfaces for interacting with repositories,” Lynch explained. “Moving data resources and tracking provenance are of major concern for the eScience community. People also wanted to think about ways to talk about collections of digital objects in the humanities communities.”

There are a range of applications emerging that needed help in this area. A technical committee was funded by the Mellon Foundation to sort through prototype standards that might support ongoing work in 2006. Planning drew on the the successful Open Archives Initiative for Metadata Harvesting Protocol experience.

“We are in a stage of development where no protocol stands alone. Where this sits in juxtaposition to other standards and protocols is a significant piece of the puzzle that will dictate how ORE will evolve,” said Lynch.

Michael Nelson, Old Dominion University went on to explain that ORE’s primary goal is to facilitate the reuse of compound information objects. For example, a complex object might consist of a PDF, another PDF, HTML and an MP3. Objects like this are not limited to scholarly examples of implementation. Complex objects might also consist of personal information—almost a scrapbook—about a vacation with several different types of documents.

There is a loss of “compondedness” in aggregating objects on the web in which separate URIs are brought together as an object that has bounded relationships among the component parts. ORE efforts suggest that there should be a contextual way to understand how objects are related and why.

ORE delineates a named route among the components that comprise the compound object with its own URI. This route with boundary information is referred to as a named resource map.

ORE’s notion of throwing a net out on the Web and noting the catch, while not relocating resources to make mini-collections, suggests that methods for assessing the trustworthiness of named graphs as an information source will be an issue for the future.

Read more about Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) here.