Month: December 2009

Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) is a framework for creating collections of related scientific work. ORE an initiative of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Web resources can be related to one another in a semantic web machine readable way. The collections or aggregations of web resources can be stored in distributed locations such as web pages and online archives. This in contrast to web services that are locking-in the data, so other users are obliged to use the same service.

When many many aggregations are made one is able to discover or detect other web resources related to another. For example a publication C can be discovered that has used the same data set B as does publication A.

The video below shows a firefox plugin that is able to visually create aggregations of web resources. It is called aus-e-lit and will be available in January 2010.

More at: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~eresearch/projects/aus-e-lit/

This system has a few drawbacks for now that we see, that should be read as suggested improvements.

• the plug-in uses the API‘s of the Fedora Commons archive directly. This should be a SWORD APP (Atom Publication Profile) client. SWORD is an interoperable protocol that can be used by far more archives.
• The content of the send aggregation should then be in RDF, standardised according to the Enhanced Publications object model delivered in the European DRIVER-II project.
• The fields the user has to fill-out are Library-minded. The namespace prefixes that are used, such as dc: and ore:, doesn’t bring the researcher any value-added information, even might confuse the user.