[Ore-acceleration] Inital comments on the spec and connection to other efforts

[Chris Bizer]

Hi Carl and all,

I have read through the Oject Reuse and Exchange document http://www.openarchives.org/ore/documents/CompoundObjects-200705.html in detail and my first impression is this is going to be an extremely useful specification that might reach far beyond the Open Archives community. I think it is a great idea to align the spec as closely as possible to general Web architecture in order to increase its impact!

If have plenty of technical comments regarding the use of Named Graphs and RDF within the spec. Therefore it might be a good idea if I produce an annotated version of the document before the meeting containing various comments and modeling ideas. What do you think?

Another interesting point is the relation of OAI-ORE to other efforts in the area. Especially, there is the POWDER working group at W3C http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ which started a while ago and has a similar duration as our effort. I don't know to much about these guys, but looking at their mission statement there seam to be clear overlapping (which shouldn't slow us down):

"The mission of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group is to develop a mechanism through which structured metadata ("Description Resources") can be authenticated and applied to groups of Web resources. This mechanism will allow retrieval of the description resources without retrieval of the resources they describe.

I have send a mail to Ivan Herman, http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/ the lead of the W3C Semantic Web activity, yesterday asking if he is aware of OAI-ORE and possible overlapping with POWDER. Stil waiting for the answer. Are you already in contact with Ivan or the POWDER working group?

I'm currently also engaged in different Open Data publishing efforts which aim at making different information sources available on the Web as RDF/Linked Data. I think the experience gained in this efforts might be very useful for our spec.

The efforts that might be most relevant for our project are:

The W3C SWEO Linking Open Data project which has published and interlinked data from various data sources on the Web. See:
Poster about the project: http://linkeddata.org/documents/eswc2007-poster-linking-open-data.pdf
Project website http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData
Data source list http://esw.w3.org/topic/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData/DataSets

The project contains three data sources about books and publications which publish meta-data as RDF/Named Graphs/Linked Data on the Web and looking at the lessons learned from them might be interesting for the project:

DBLP Bibliography Server at Hannover University: http://dblp.l3s.de/d2r/
DBLP Bibliograph Server at Freie University Berlin: http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/ (both serving DBLP as Linked Data with dereferencable URIs that support content negotiation in order to retrieve HTML or RDF representations of meta data)
RDF Book Mashup: http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/bookmashup/index.html which is basically a wrapper around Amazon and Google base which gives you dereferenable URIs for each book with a ISBN number and backs these URIs with RDF descriptions based on data from Amazon and Google (violating there license agreements, but it seams that they don't care as long as it is research).
There is a paper about the Book Mashup at http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/Bizer-ESWC2007-RDFbookmashup.pdf and slides at http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/Bizer-atal-ESWC2007-BookMashup-Slides.pdf

Another paper that might be relevant for our context is the Cool URIs paper http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/2006/11/cooluris/ which reflects a current W3C TAG decision on the distinction between URIs for information resources and URIs for real-world things and abstract concepts. See http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/httpRange-14/2007-05-31/HttpRange-14 for the original TAG finding which is relevant for the second use case about scanned books in section 7 of our spec.

I'm looking forward to seeing all of you in person at our meeting in August.

Cheers,

Chris



 
--
Chris Bizer
Freie Universität Berlin
+49 30 838 54057
chris at bizer.de
www.bizer.de
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