DefiningImageAccess/Project/ORE
From ImageWeb
| DefiningImageAccess/Project/ORE | |
|---|---|
| homepage:=http://www.openarchives.org/ore/}} | |
| [[has sub-project::{{{Subproject}}}]]}} | |
| sub-project of::DefiningImageAccess/Project/Pathways}} | |
| [[start date:={{{Start date}}}]]}} | |
| [[end date:={{{End date}}}]]}} | |
| Status:=Initial Stage}} | |
| JISCProject:=False}} | |
| [[Image Materials:={{{ImageMaterials}}}]]}} | |
| Focus:=Interoperability}} | |
| [[Publishes::{{{Publishes}}}]]}} | |
| [[References::{{{References}}}]]}} | |
| [[Uses::{{{Uses}}}]]}} | |
| [[Creates::{{{Creates}}}]]}} | |
| [[Partner::{{{Partner}}}]]}} | |
| [[Contact::{{{Contact}}}]]}} | |
ORE: Object Reuse and Exchange
- http://www.openarchives.org/ore/ - Open Archives Initiative, Object Reuse and Exchange
See also:
This is a relatively new project, which has yet to produce final results.
From its project page:
Exchanging Information about Digital Objects
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.
A report of a preparatory meeting (April 2006) is here: http://msc.mellon.org/Meetings/Interop/ - Augmenting interoperability across scholarly repositories
Looking at that meeting agenda and other reports linked from the projects front page, it seems fairly clear that the earlier work of the Pathways project will be a significant input for this project.
The final report (http://msc.mellon.org/Meetings/Interop/FinalReport) from the preparatory meeting makes good reading for two reasons: it indicates the initial directions for the ORE project, and it also represents a considered discussion of the architecture and ideas proposed by the Pathways project. From this report, it seems clear that the Pathways project is the main initial input to the continuing ORE project.
I think it would be good to keep in touch with this work for our data webs work, but it's not clear what it might produce in the timeframe of Defining Image Access. Our consulting partner Rachel Heery is on the Liaison Group for this project. Several other institutions with whom we are working are also represented (Southampton, UKOLN, Cambridge, Nature Publishing Group, Imperial College).
Update, 21-June-2007
The project has released a white paper:
- http://www.openarchives.org/ore/documents/CompoundObjects-200705.html - Compound Information Objects: The OAI-ORE Perspective
"In summary, the web architecture expresses the notion of linked URI-identified resources. Information systems can leverage this architecture to publish the components of a compound object and thereby make them available to web clients and services. But due to the absence of commonly accepted standards, the notion of an identified compound object with a distinct boundary and typed relationships among its component resources is lost."
This paper examines some shortcomings in current web technologies for dealing with compound digital objects, and how they may be overcome: "The OAI-ORE standards will make it possible for web clients and applications to reconstruct the logical boundaries of compound objects, the relationships among their internal components, and their relationships to the other resources in the web information space."
The white paper goes on to talk specifically about establishing standardized means to publish RDF named graphs to the web, thus "Exposing Logical Boundaries in the Web Graph". I also note that the language of this paper is very much aligned with that of the Semantic Web, e.g. "While these mechanisms embed the components of the compound object in a manner that is of utility to human users, machine interpretation and reuse of the information in these contexts is difficult or impossible".
Section 4 introduces mechanisms for publishing named graphs to the web in ways which are quite unsurprising. It also introduces the notion of a "resource map", described as a machine-readable equiavelent of a "splash page", to allow software processes to find the components of a compound object described by such a published graph.
A framework such as is being developed and explored here, based firmly on web and semantic web ideas, should be able to smoothly encompass descriptive data of the kind we need to describe image content, to be used for image discovery and interpretation.
METS, MPEG-21 and ORE
Why are there so many standards and activities that appear to deal with compound object packaging? Why introduce yet another one? METS may be seen as a very competent and complete encapsulation framework, which is not obviously overburdened with mandatory detail, and is already used as the internal storage format for Fedora. One may ask what it is that later projects such as Pathways, MPEG21-DID and ORE provide that is not already included in this established specification.
One view on this is that METS and MPEG21-DIDL are used for the same purpose of packaging up stuff, along with IMS Content Packaging (http://imsglobal.org/content/packaging/, used by SCORM (DefiningImageAccess/Standard/SCORM) which is largely used for learning objects. The choice of which to use depends largely on existing expertise and, to a degree, purpose. METS is geared more towards library-esque structured information and DIDL comes out of the MPEG21 work and is much more heavyweight. Use of MPEG21 in the scholarly communications area is arguably limited, but its use by Los Alamos does raise its profile somewhat.
ORE is doing something a little bit different, in that it's primarily about sharing serializations of compound objects using the web architecture - it has a pretty defined scope. At present (July 2007), ORE doesn't even have an abstract data model, and it's possible that METS and/or DIDL might be able to do what ORE is aiming at and might well be 'in the pot' when ORE are choosing what to use. MPEG21 DID is primarily an abstract model, and secondarily an XML serialization of that model.
In choosing which to use, the choice between DIDL and METS may be mainly based on what/who you already know and what the available software natively supports, with ORE offering a new mechanism that could well sit alongside this. For our data webs work, which has a focus on exchanging information in the web, ORE's similar focus is of particular relevance. What we are trying to do with data webs is create interfaces that abstract away from storage format standards, and focus on ways to access and cross-link information, a purpose which ORE's reuse and exchange focus will plausibly support.
