The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has released the beta version of the ORE specifications and user guides as part of its Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) project. Under the project, launched 18 months ago, international experts from the publishing, web, library and e-science community developed standards for the identification and description of aggregations of online information resources. These aggregations may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data and video. These standards aim to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualisation, reuse and preservation.
The beta version of the OAI-ORE specifications and implementation documents were released to the public on June 2, 2008. These documents describe a data model to introduce aggregations as resources with URIs on the web. They also detail the machine-readable descriptions of aggregations expressed in the Atom syndication format, in RDF/XML and RDFa.
A forum for feedback on this beta release is available at http://groups.google.com/group/oai-ore. The feedbacks and further consultation with the OAI-ORE community will be considered in the evolution of this beta release to a production release scheduled for September 2008.
