1. Issues to be considered

The following topics are agenda items for the next ORE Technical Committee meeting (to be held in January 2008).

1.1 Aggregation without enumeration

There is considerable interest in extending the ORE Data Model to handle the notion of aggregation without explicitly enumerating all of the Aggregated Resources. This would likely involve a URI templating mechanism.

1.2 Choice regarding external vocabularies

Should the ORE select or promote certain vocabularies as preferred or not?

2. Open Issues noted in specific documents

The following issues are noted in the current OAI-ORE specification and user guide documents and have yet to be resolved. Each section refers to a specific document and a particular issue may appear in more than one document.

2.1 ORE Specification - Abstract Data Model

2.1.1 Use of owl sameAs

There is some uncertainty over whether this is an appropriate use of owl:sameAs, which by some interpretations implies an exact equivalence between the subject and object of triples with this predicate. Indeed, we do not mean exact equivalence but an assertion of semantic equivalence.

2.1.2 Is the Internal External distinction helpful

The distinction between internal and external relationships may prove to be more confusing than useful and may be excluded from future versions.

2.1.3 Need SPARQL for External Relationships

SPARQL query to extract Triples which assert External Relationships is needed.

2.2 ORE Specification - Vocabulary

2.2.1 Use of owl sameAs

There is debate over whether owl:sameAs is appropriate for this use. The arguments are as follows:

• Pro: owl:sameAs asserts that two resources are the same thing. Just because we're coining a new term (an Aggregation) for the compound object, doesn't in any way change the object, we're just describing it with a different terminology. This is exactly what owl:sameAs was designed for.
• Con: owl:sameAs allows you to replace any instance of the subject with the object in any triple asserted about the object. For example if A owl:sameAs B, and B dc:creator "Rob" then A dc:creator "Rob". However, the creator of the Aggregation is not necessarily the creator of the object being described by the aggregation. The creation time of the Aggregation is almost certainly different. So they are different resources and hence owl:sameAs isn't appropriate.

Current thought is towards defining a new relationship: ore:alsoKnownAs or ore:aka.

2.3 ORE User Guide - Data Model Overview

2.3.1 Use of owl sameAs

There is some uncertainty over whether this is an appropriate use of owl:sameAs, which by some interpretations implies an exact equivalence between the subject and object of triples with this predicate. We do not mean exact equivalence but an assertion of semantic equivalence.

2.4 ORE User Guide - Resource Map Discovery

2.4.1 Links in HTML pages

HTML does not provide appropriateattributes in the A and IMG elements to link to a Resource Map as well as the target resource. This section suggests either the addition of extra attributes to the A and IMG elements (which would make otherwise valid HTML documents invalid), or re-purposing an existing attribute.