[Asis-l] NISO and OAI Publish American National Standard on ResourceSync Framework Specification

[Cynthia Hodgson]

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Open Archives
Initiative (OAI) announce the publication of the ResourceSync Framework
Specification (ANSI/NISO Z39.99-2014)-a new American National Standard for
the web detailing various capabilities that a server can implement to allow
third-party systems to remain synchronized with its evolving resources. The
ResourceSync joint project, funded with support from the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation and Jisc, was initiated to develop a new open standard on the
real-time synchronization of web resources.

"Increasingly, large-scale digital collections are available from multiple
hosting locations, are cached at multiple servers, and leveraged by several
services," explains Herbert Van de Sompel, Scientist, Los Alamos National
Laboratory, OAI Executive, and Co-chair of the ResourceSync Working Group.
"Since Web resources are continually changing, this proliferation of content
yields the challenging problem of keeping services that leverage a server's
evolving content synchronized in a timely and accurate manner. Our two-year
collaborative effort resulted in a specification that can be used to meet
this challenge for a wide variety of use cases. This was possible by
devising a modular specification and by grounding it in protocols that are
already widely adopted."

"The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) 2.0 specification can be
used to effectively synchronize the metadata about resources," states Simeon
Warner, Director, IT Application Development, Cornell University, "but
synchronizing the resources themselves was never specified. Although some
resource synchronization methods exist, they are generally ad hoc, arranged
by the individuals involved, and cannot be universally deployed. This new
specification fills that void."

"The ResourceSync specification introduces a range of easy to implement
capabilities that a server may support to enable remote systems to remain
more tightly in step with its evolving resources," explains Michael L.
Nelson, Associate Professor, Old Dominion University Computer. "It also
describes how a server can advertise the capabilities it supports. Remote
systems can inspect this information to determine how best to remain aligned
with the evolving data. All capabilities are implemented on the basis of the
document formats introduced by the Sitemap protocol. Capabilities can be
combined to achieve varying levels of functionality and hence meet different
local or community requirements."

"We expect this new standard will save a tremendous amount of time, effort,
and resources by repository managers through the automation of the
replication and updating process," states Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive
Director. "The end result will be to increase the general availability of
content in web repositories and alleviate the variety of problems created by
out-dated, inaccurate, superseded content that exists on the Internet
today."

The ResourceSync specification and video tutorials on using the standard are
available on the NISO website at
<http://www.niso.org/workrooms/resourcesync/>
www.niso.org/workrooms/resourcesync/.

 

 

Cynthia Hodgson

Technical Editor / Consultant

National Information Standards Organization

chodgson at niso.org

301-654-2512

 

 

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