Herbert Van de Sompel
Information Scientist
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Michael L. Nelson
Professor Computer Science
Old Dominion University
Over the past 15 years, our perspective on tackling information interoperability problems for Web-based scholarship has evolved significantly. In this presentation, we look back at three efforts that we have been involved in that aptly illustrate this evolution: OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, 1999), OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange, 2006), and Memento (2009). Understanding that no interoperability specification is neutral, we attempt to characterize the perspectives and technical toolkits that provided the basis for these endeavors. With that regard, we consider repository-centric and Web-centric interoperability perspectives, and the use of a Linked Data or a REST/HATEAOS (Representational State Transfer/Hypertext As The Engine Of Application State) technology stack, respectively. We consider that the REST/HATEAOS approach has the lowest barrier to entry because it is directly based on the omnipresent HTTP. Therefore, we suggest that this approach has the best chance for achieving a coarse yet meaningful level of interoperability across nodes that play a role in Web-based scholarly communication and research. We provide examples of common patterns in Web-based scholarship that can be tackled using this approach, including the landing page pattern, resource versioning, creating snapshots, for example, of software in scholarly repositories.
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html
http://www.openarchives.org/ore/
http://mementoweb.org/about/