ORE Challenge at RepoCamp 2008 - Entries and Results

19 September 2008

The ORE Challenge at RepoCamp 2008 received five compelling entries showcasing the value and potential of OAI-ORE. However, there can be only one winner and that is OREsome. Creator Ross McFarlane will receive a cash prize from Microsoft Research. All of the entries are described below along with links to the screen casts:

The ORE Challenge competition was based around the 0.9 beta OAI-ORE specifications. The specifications are currently being revised based on community feedback and the release of v1.0 is scheduled for October 2008.

We are grateful to David Flanders and other organizers of RepoCamp 2008 (held on 25 July 2008 at the Library of Congress, see D-Lib report) for coordinating the challenge; to Savas Parastatidis, David Flanders, Rob Sanderson and Tim DiLauro for judging the challenge; and to Microsoft Research for sponsorship. The entry guidelines were:

There will be a cash prize of $2000, sponsored by Microsoft Research, for the the best prototype that uses and promotes OAI-ORE. Entries will be considered and judged with the following criteria:

  1. The prototype must leverage the value of OAI-ORE.
  2. The prototype must surface OAI-ORE powered functionality at the end-user level (e.g. in a browser). OAI-ORE should not only be hidden plumbing.
  3. The more potential the prototype has to promote ORE within and beyond the repository community the better!

[full announcement]

OREsome

Ross McFarlane (University of Liverpool)

Summary

ORESome solves the problem of understanding and navigating the structure of highly nested ORE aggregations, such as the journal/issue/article/page hierarchy, in a very interactive and visual manner. It was developed in Java, using the proce55ing toolkit, plus the foresite java library for ORE parsing.

Using OAI-ORE and SWORD in an ejournal-to-repository workflow

Leo Monus (developer), Scott Yeadon (developer), Chris Blackall (screencast), Tran Le (website) (APSR/The Australian National University (ANU))

Summary

SWORD and OAI-ORE together provide support for the development of standard utilities and workflows for depositing content to repositories or service points. This demonstration shows how an OAI-ORE resource map can be used to support the preservation of the structural metadata of a complex/compound object within a repository and how that same OAI-ORE resource map can provide the means for a delivery application to provide access to a complex object in a sensible form direct from the repository. The specific use case in our demonstration shows a SWORD-based deposit of an Open Journal Systems (OJS) journal issue to a DSpace repository via an OJS SWORD Plugin and subsequent access by an end-user. As part of the deposit process, an OAI-ORE resource map representing the aggregation of the issue articles is created and stored as a repository item. The OAI-ORE resource map stored alongside the issue articles is then used by DSpace Manakin to render the journal issue to an end-user.

Related links: SWORD Wiki, OJS, and DSpace.

OAI-ORE Importer for Omeka

Sean Hannan (Sheridan Libraries, John Hopkins University)

Summary

This plugin allows users to migrate other content that is described by an ORE resource map into the Omeka exhibition software. Omeka as a platform allows much more flexibility for display as opposed to traditional preservation-based repository software. For example, if Flickr were to describe their collections with ORE, users could ingest their favorite photo sets/pools/tag groups into Omeka and design an entire interactive experience around those photos, rather than be restricted to the utilitarian Flickr interface. As with ORE itself, content types are not limited to photos; for this screencast I ingested a blog. The plugin (as with all Omeka plugins) is written in PHP. Parsing of the resource map was accomplished with PHP's SimpleXML object. (Sorry for the minute of dead air. Crawling a website takes a while.)

Related links: Omeka, and ORE WordPress plugin (This plugin is based off of my own DSpace importer for Omeka, which is in turn, modeled after the Omeka Dropbox plugin).

LORE: Literature Object Reuse and Exchange

Anna Gerber, Jane Hunter, Kerry Kilner (The University of Queensland, Australia)

Summary

LORE (Literature Object Re-use and Exchange) is a light-weight prototype which is designed to allow scholars and teachers of Australian literature to author, edit and publish compound information objects encapsulating related digital resources and bibliographic records via an in-browser visual interface. LORE enables users to easily create OAI-ORE-compliant compound objects, and also enables them to describe and publish them to an RDF repository as Named Graphs. Using LORE, literary scholars can create typed relationships between individual atomic objects using terms from a bibliographic ontology and can attach metadata to the compound object.

Within the discipline of literature research and teaching, the ability to relate disparate digital resources in a standardized, machine-readable format has the potential to add significant value to distributed collections of literary resources. Such compound objects can be used to: track the lineage of derivative works which are based on a common concept or idea; or to relate disparate objects that are related to a common theme; or to encapsulate related digital resources for teaching purposes. For example, one might want to relate the original edition of 'Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence' to the illustrated edition, a study guide or a digital version of the film based on the novel.

LORE is implemented as a Mozilla Firefox extension using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and XUL. The current version of LORE uses a Sesame 2 RDF data store running as a Tomcat Java Servlet for storing and querying the Named Graphs representing the compound objects, however we are also working on support for Fedora.

We made use of the following open source libraries in developing LORE: RDF Parser, Open Jacob draw 2d, and Ext js 1.1.

The types for intra-aggregation relationships as well as metadata terms for aggregated objects are described by an OWL ontology which can be specified in the options. We have developed an OWL ontology to use with LORE that describes the AustLit data model, which is based on IFLA FRBR. In this screen cast we are also using a very simple ontology created to demonstrate how LORE can be used to use compound objects to share teaching resources.

Related links: Aus-e-Lit, and AustLit Data Models.

PeekORE

Jim Downing, Andrew Walkingshaw (University of Cambridge)

Summary

PeekORE is a javascript application that uses preloading and ORE autodiscovery to decorate links to pages representing ORE aggregations. It then allows users to quickly view and click through to the contents of an aggregation in a dynamic popup pane, without leaving the original page. It was inspired by the general coolness of feed autodiscovery, ORE autodiscovery, and Stacks, a glossy feature in OS X Leopard.

Kudos: The code uses the jQuery library for all of its DOM manipulation, AJAX and event handling. jQuery is awesome. Pulling data from the Oxford Research Archive made this much, much easier. Thanks to Oxford Uni Library, and especially to Ben O'Steen for getting running such a cutting edge production system.