In this paper we present a model based on the principles of Linked Data that
can be used to describe the interrelationships of images, texts and other
resources to facilitate the interoperability of repositories of medieval
manuscripts or other culturally important handwritten documents. The model is
designed from a set of requirements derived from the real world use cases of
some of the largest digitized medieval content holders, and instantiations of
the model are intended as the input to collection-independent page turning and
scholarly presentation interfaces.
Dereferencing a URI returns a representation of the current state of the
resource identified by that URI. But, on the Web representations of prior
states of a resource are also available, for example, as resource versions in
Content Management Systems or archival resources in Web Archives such as the
Internet Archive. This paper introduces a resource versioning mechanism that is
fully based on HTTP and uses datetime as a global version indicator.
As Digital Libraries (DL) become more aligned with the web architecture,
their functional components need to be fundamentally rethought in terms of URIs
and HTTP. Annotation, a core scholarly activity enabled by many DL solutions,
exhibits a clearly unacceptable characteristic when existing models are applied
to the web: due to the representations of web resources changing over time, an
annotation made about a web resource today may no longer be relevant to the
representation that is served from that same resource tomorrow.
In the process of scientific research, many information objects are
generated, all of which may remain valuable indefinitely. However, artifacts
such as instrument data and associated calibration information may have little
value in isolation; their meaning is derived from their relationships to each
other. Individual artifacts are best represented as components of a life cycle
that is specific to a scientific research domain or project.
Work in the Open Archives Initiative - Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE)
focuses on an important aspect of infrastructure for eScience: the
specification of the data model and a suite of implementation standards to
identify and describe compound objects. These are objects that aggregate
multiple sources of content including text, images, data, visualization tools,
and the like. These aggregations are an essential product of eScience, and will
become increasingly common in the age of data-driven scholarship. The OAI-ORE