Yesterday I went to the LITA sponsered talk about OAI-ORE. I went because I wanted to see the man (the myth, the legend) behind SFX and OpenURL, as well as bX, Ex Libris’ new recommender service.  Basically, if it weren’t for Herbert Van de Sompel‘s brain I wouldn’t have had a job for the two years prior to working at Wheaton, so you know…I had to go.

So anyway, on to the real meat of the post.  What is ORE?  Well that’s a great question; let’s see if I can sum up what I’ve learned.

First, Herbert did a quick crash course on what RDF was.  It consisted of this:

• resources exist at a particular URI
• RDF is about explaining resources
• there are things called RDF triples, they consist of a subject, predicate, and object
• if you don’t have a URI for a resource you can have something called a literal

Below is an image of RDF triples:

Kind of an abstract idea, but if you’re really interested in learning more check out W3C’s page on RDF, perhaps reading the RDF primer first (of course I recommend this, but I have yet to do that myself).

Ok so now that we have a basic understanding of RDF we can move on and gain a basic understanding of ORE (supposedly).

The ORE Primer states that:

Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources.

Brilliant, so now instead of just describing one resource we can aggregate resources together, but then what?  OAI-ORE uses the same http 303 redirect guidelines that linked data does to redirect users to something called a resource map.  This map describes how the different resources in the aggregation are related to one another.

What’s great about the resource map is that it lives in what Herbert calls the two web worlds (web 2.0 and the semantic web).  The resource map can be written in Atom XML, RDF, and RDFa (RDFa is like RDF except in XHTML rather than XML).

So now we can have aggregations of resources in a machine readable map rather than sitting out there as seperate resources seemingly unrelated to one another.

Herbet went on to say that Dr. Robert Sanderson at the University of Liverpool actually went through and created resource maps for everything in JSTOR.  You can find out a little more about this project via this Code4Lib listserv posting.

So that’s OAI-ORE in a nutshell.  A very small, simple minded nutshell.