The US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Open Archives Initiative have been awarded a $222,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The grant is for a joint project to develop a new open standard on the real-time synchronisation of web resources.
Increasingly, it has been observed, large-scale digital collections are available from multiple hosting locations, are cached at multiple servers, and leveraged by several services. This proliferation of replicated copies of works or data on the Internet has created an increasingly challenging problem of keeping the repositories' holdings and the services that leverage them up-to-date and accurate. As we move from a web of documents to a web of data, synchronisation becomes even more important: decisions made based on unsynchronised or incoherent scientific or economic data can have serious deleterious impact.
This proposal is an outgrowth of the issues exposed in the context of the Memento project that developed a protocol for uniformly accessing time-stamped resource versions on the web. According to Memento project representatives, a stellar core team has been formed to devise the standard from the Sloan grant. It includes people that have worked on a variety of information interoperability efforts such as Memento; the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE), a protocol for describing aggregations of Web resources; Open Annotation, a resource-centric annotation framework; and the DSNotify change detection framework for Linked Data.
The new work item for the project has been approved by the NISO Voting Members. An interest group e-mail list will be established for those interested in following the project.
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