Title: Interweaving OAI-PMH data sources with the linked data cloud

Authors: Bernhard Haslhofer, Bernhard Schandl

Addresses: Department of Distributed and Multimedia Systems, University of Vienna, Liebiggasse 4/3-4, A-1010 Vienna, Austria. ' Department of Distributed and Multimedia Systems, University of Vienna, Liebiggasse 4/3-4, A-1010 Vienna, Austria

Abstract: The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) has found widespread adoption for exchanging bibliographic metadata. In parallel, the W3C|s Linking Open Data Initiative exposes and interlinks structured data from a variety of data sources on the web. Since many of these data sources contain valuable information for institutional repositories (e.g., shared concept definitions, thesauri, etc.), we believe that institutions that currently expose their data via OAI-PMH can benefit if they integrate their metadata with the data available in the Linked Data cloud. To achieve such an integration, we must bridge the OAI-PMH-specific protocol characteristics that currently prevent OAI-PMH metadata from being interoperable with the Linked Data approach of exposing data. As first contribution of this paper, we describe a possible solution for exposing OAI-PMH metadata on the web as part of the Linked Data cloud. As a second contribution, we present a rule-based mechanism for linking these metadata with other relevant data sources together with a case study that describes possible linking scenarios for three representative OAI-PMH data providers. Finally, we discuss certain quality criteria that OAI-PMH metadata must meet to benefit from data exposed by other Linked Data sources.

Keywords: metadata exchange; semantic web; linked data cloud; OAI-PMH; metadata harvesting; bibliographic metadata.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2010.032648

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2010 Vol.5 No.1, pp.17 - 31

Published online: 09 Apr 2010 *

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