Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Since the advent of the web, more elements of scholarly communication are occurring online . A world that once consisted mostly of conference proceedings, books, and journal articles now includes blog posts, project websites, datasets, software projects, and more. Efforts like LOCKSS , CLOCKSS , and Portico preserve the existing journal system, but there is no similar dedicated effort for the web presence of scholarly communication . Because web-based scholarly communication is born on the web, it can benefit from web archiving . This is complicated by the complexity of scholarly objects. Consider a dataset on the website Figshare , whose landing page is shown in Fig. 1. Each dataset on Figshare has a landing page consisting of a title, owner name, brief description, licensing information, and links to bibliographic metadata in various forms. If an archivist merely downloads the dataset and ignores the rest, then a future scholar using their holdings is denied context and addit

Earlier this week Herbert Van de Sompel gave a webinar for the ICSU World Data System entitled " Web-Centric Solutions for Web-Based Scholarship ".  It's a short and simple review of some of the interoperability projects we've worked on through since 1999, including OAI-PMH , OAI-ORE , and Memento .  He ends with a short nod to his simple but powerful " Signposting the Scholarly Web " proposal, but the slides in the appendix give the full description. The main point of this presentation was to document how each project successively further embraced the web, not just as a transport protocol but fully adopting the semantics as part of the protocol.  Herbert and I then had a fun email discussion about how the web, scholarly communication, and digital libraries were different in 1999 (the time of OAI-PMH & our initial collaboration) and now.  Some highlights include: Although Google existed, it was not the hegemonic force that it is today, and co

October was a busy travel month. On October 11-13, I attended a technical meeting for the Open Annotation Collaboration project at Berkeley, CA. From there, I traveled to Berlin, Germany to give a keynote about OAI-ORE at the Wireless Communication and Information Conference (WCI 2009). Michael Herzog was kind enough to invite me to speak there again; I also gave an invited talk at Media Production 2007 , also in Berlin. After a short week back in the US, it was off to Lima, Peru to give another keynote about OAI-ORE, this time at Reunión Interamericana de Bibliotecarios, Documentalistas y Especialistas en Información Agrícola, or RIBDA 2009 . This was also another repeat performance -- I had given an invited talk about OAI-PMH in Lima in 2004 , and my colleague there, Libio Huaroto, invited me back. Slides from the keynotes are probably available on the conference web sites, however they were both edited versions of the more detailed ORE seminar I recently gave at Emory

A significant part of my research time in 2007-2008 was spent working on the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse & Exchange project (OAI-ORE, or simply just ORE). Producing the OR E suite of eight documents was difficult and took longer than I anticipated, but we had an excellent team and I'm extremely proud of the results. In the process, I also learned a great deal about the building blocks of ORE: the Web Architecture , Linked Data and RDF . I'm often asked "What is ORE?" and I don't always have a good, short answer. The simplest way I like to describe ORE is "machine readable splash-pages". More formally, ORE addresses the problem of identifying Aggregations of Resources on the Web. For example, we often use the URI of an html page as the identifier of an entire collection of Resources. Consider this YouTube URI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkJDKdOlUGQ Technically, it identifies just the html page that is returned when that URI