Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE)

Open Archives Initiative
United States of America

About

Launched: 2008
Record Updated: Nov 07, 2024
Standard, specification or protocol
Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines a Linked Data approach for the description and exchange of identified aggregations of Web resources. These aggregations, sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and video. The goal of the specification is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation.

Mission

The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.

Key Achievements

The Open Archives Initiative coordinated efforts to devise three interoperability specifications: the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, Object Reuse and Exchange, and ResourceSync. Of these, the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting has been the most successful with global adoption also beyond the target scholarly communication community. Object Reuse and Exchange has been adopted in some data management approaches (e.g. Dataverse) and has served as an inspiration for related work (e.g. Research Objects, RO-Crate). Despite its formal standardization (ANSI/NISO), ResourceSync has been poorly adopted.

Technical Attributes

Maintenance Status

Actively Maintained

Open Code Repository

Implemented

Technical Documentation

Implemented

Technical Attribute Statements

Technology Readiness Level

  • Actual system proven in operational environment

Content Licensing

  • Creative commons licenses

Standards

Persistent Identifier

Any PID that identifies a scholarly web resource as long as it is conveyed as an HTTP URI.

Integrations

  • Dataverse

Community Engagement

Community Engagement

Implemented

Community Statements

Community Engagement Activities

  • Mailing lists and discussion forums (including Slack)

Engagement with Values Frameworks

  • COAR Next Generation Repositories Principles

Additional Information

Organizational History

In 1999, Paul Ginsparg, Rick Luce, and Herbert Van de Sompel called a meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, (https://www.openarchives.org/meetings/SantaFe1999/ups-invitation-ori.htm) to discuss interoperability between e-print servers as a means to promote communication by means of preprints. This meeting (press release at https://www.openarchives.org/news/ups1-press.htm) led to the creation of the "Santa Fe Convention," (https://doi.org/10.1045/february2000-vandesompel-oai) an interface enabling e-print servers to structure and share metadata for their papers with discovery services. Recognizing the broader applicability of these solutions, the Coalition for Networked Information and the Digital Library Federation provided funding to establish the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) secretariat, managed by Van de Sompel and Carl Lagoze. The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) was introduced in 2001, evolving into version 2.0 by June 2002. Subsequently, CERN and the University of Geneva began organizing bi-annual OAI workshops, which have expanded to encompass various aspects of open science. In 2021, the workshop series was renamed the "Geneva Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication," often referred to as "OAI" to honor its origins. (summarized from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archives_Initiative_Protocol_for_Metadata_Harvesting ). The Open Archives Initiative launched two more interoperability specification efforts after OAI-PMH: OAI-ORE (2014) and ResourceSync (2017). The core team for all efforts consisted of Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson, Herbert Van de Sompel, and Simeon Warner.

Organizational Structure

Business or Ownership Model

Volunteer community

Full-time Staff

0

Volunteers

1-5

Current Affiliations

Cornell University ; Data Archiving Networked Services (DANS)

Funding

Primary Funding Source

  • Contributions