ResourceSync (Resource Synchronization)
A Joint NISO and Open Archives Initiative (OAI) project
Upcoming Tutorial Fall 2013!
Participants at the 2013 LITA Forum in Louisville in mid-November are invited to stay a few hours longer on Sunday, November 10 to attend the ResourceSync Tutorial, which will be held after the close of the main conference from 1:30-4:30 p.m. Herbert van de Sompel will lead this 3-hour session where attendees can learn about how the emerging ResourceSync standard can be used to synchronize web resources between servers. This post-conference tutorial is available at no cost. As we would appreciate knowing how many people are coming, please select the post conference checkbox on the registration form.
View the beta version of the specification and provide feedback on the ResourceSync Google Group.
BACKGROUND
ResourceSync will research, develop, prototype, test, and deploy mechanisms for the large-scale synchronization of web resources. ResourceSync, begun in late 2011, is a joint cooperation between NISO and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) team, with work funded by the Sloan Foundation. Building on the OAI-PMH strategies for synchronizing metadata, this project will enhance that specification using modern web technologies, but will allow for the synchronization of the objects themselves, not just their metadata.
Because of the proliferation of replicated copies of works or data on the Internet, keeping the repositories’ holdings up-to-date and accurate is an increasingly challenging problem. By automating the replication and updating process, the new standard will save a tremendous amount of time, effort, and resources by repository managers, increase the general availability of content available from these repositories, as well as alleviate the variety of problems created by outdated, inaccurate, superseded content that exists on the Internet.
Synchronization is especially important for high integrity or essential web resources. For example, portals that deliver high quality services pertaining to aggregations of cultural or scholarly resources would clearly benefit from reliable, uniform, and scalable techniques to remain in sync with the collections they build upon. As we move from a web of documents to a web of data, synchronization becomes even more important: decisions made based on unsynchronized or incoherent scientific or economic data can have serious deleterious impact.
The end product of the work will be a specification, vetted by experts and test implementations, which details an approach to synchronize Web resources at scale in an interoperable manner.