Meeting Goals and Topics
The goals of the meeting are:
If the meeting is successful, funding requests and developer commitments will be
solicited to support:
Based on inspiration gained from projects such as aDORe, CORDRA, the Chinese DSpace Federation project, various JISC projects, and the OAI effort, the following discussion topics are proposed:
In order to make as much progress as possible, the following assumptions are made that will be briefly validated with the participants at the start of the meeting:
- To agree on the nature and characteristics of a limited set of core, protocol-based repository interfaces (REST-full and/or SOAP-based Web services) that allow downstream applications to interact with heterogeneous repositories in an efficient and consistent manner.
- To compile a concrete list of action items aimed at fully specifying, validating and implementing such repository interfaces.
- To devise a timeline for the specification, validation and implementation of such repository interfaces.
solicited to support:
- Compiling, validating and publishing the required interoperability specifications.
- Implementing those specifications for widely deployed repository software packages, and for major content repositories.
- Educating developers and potential developers (particularly of downstream applications) about the interoperability specifications.
Based on inspiration gained from projects such as aDORe, CORDRA, the Chinese DSpace Federation project, various JISC projects, and the OAI effort, the following discussion topics are proposed:
- Repository level interoperability:
- Support for a complex object format representation of Digital Objects that can be used for interchange between repositories and downstream applications as well as between repositories. This includes:
- An interoperable data model for the exchange of Digital Objects
- An interoperable manner to serialize Digital Objects according to (a profile of) an XML-based complex object format.
- Harvest interface: Repository interface from which XML-based complex object representations of Digital Objects can be harvested. The discussion here focuses on the discovery use case as well as on cross-repository synchronization, and (partial) mirroring or replication.
- Get interface:
- Repository interface from which a complex object representation of an identified Digital Object can be obtained.
- Repository interface from which a list of repository-specific services pertaining to an identified Digital Object can be obtained. This discussion can include the definition and identification of a core set of service requests that are understood by all repositories.
- Submit interface: Repository interface to which a Digital Object (likely represented according to an XML-based complex object format) can beput from client applications, as well as from other repositories.
- Infrastructure level interoperability:
- Registries of repositories and their service interfaces.
- Authentication and authorization should not be a focus of the discussions. At most, the discussions need to ensure that proposed solutions have the necessary hooks to work properly with authentication and authorization frameworks such as Shibboleth that are presently under development.
- The discussions should not focus on the exact nature of the variety of secondary information (rights, relationships, provenance, preservation, etc.) that can be conveyed about Digital Objects. However, the discussions need to ensure that proposed solutions (especially the complex object format) have the capability of conveying such information.
- The discussions and the proposed solutions should be accommodating to a large range of business models, ranging from commercial to open content, and agnostic to the choice of model.
