From Peter Suber's Open Access News, Wednesday April 16,2008
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/data-exchange-among-disparate
Status: O
Message-ID: <dummy6658644633_at_invented.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
.html
Data exchange among disparate repositories
ECS developers win $5000 repository challenge, a press release from
the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer
Science (ECS), April 15, 2008. Excerpt:
Developers from ECS, Southampton, and Oxford University
won a $5000 challenge competition which took place at
the OR08 Open Repositories international conference.
Dave Tarrant, Tim Brody (Southampton) and Ben O'Steen
(Oxford), beat a large field of contenders, including
finalists from the USA and Australia, by demonstrating
that digital data can be moved easily between storage
sites running different software while remaining
accessible to users (watch video). This approach has
important implications for data management and
preservation on the Web....
[W]ith the growth of institutional repositories alongside
subject-based repositories, and in cases where
multiple-authors of a paper belong to different
institutions, it is important to be able to share and
copy content between repositories.
Meanwhile the repository space has become characterised
by many types of repository software - DSpace, EPrints
and Fedora are the most widely used open source
repository software - containing many different types of
content, including texts, multimedia and interactive
teaching materials. So although sharing content and
making it widely available (interoperability) has always
been a driver for repository development, actually moving
content on a large scale between repositories and
providing access from all sources is not easy.
The OR08 challenge, set by the Common Repository
Interfaces Group (CRIG), had just one rule for the
competition: the prototype created had to utilise two
different 'repository' platforms....
This data transfer was achieved using an emerging
framework known as Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE), a
topic that attracted one of the highest attendances at
OR08....
Comment [from Peter Suber]. Congratulations to Tarrant, Brody, and
O'Steen. I look forward to the day when institutional repositories
can harvest full-texts and metadata from disciplinary repositories
and vice versa. That will greatly reduce the temperature on the
question where researchers initially deposit their work (and where
universities and funders require them to deposit their work), and
greatly increase the security of deposits (on the LOCKSS principle).
Thanks to ORE and the tools developed by the Southampton-Oxford team,
this day is not far off.
Received on Wed Apr 16 2008 - 14:46:34 BST