The Object Reuse and Exchange initiative, under the Open Archives umbrella, aims to provide a method of describing complex digital objects in order to provide boundaries on an otherwise formless web. As scholarly communication becomes more open and personal, distinguishing and being able to cite online multi-resource objects becomes both more difficult and more important. In order to ensure that it is possible to reference existing works, and hence to provide an initial impetus for scholarly communication using these digital objects, a large scale collection of ORE-described academic resources is essential to provide citation targets and to facilitate further research. It is envisioned that these resources would then be cited from new works, and the descriptions used as surrogates for the work in institutional repositories with URI pointers to the originals held outside of the repository.

The main aim of FORESITE is to experiment with using the current ORE specifications to describe a large academically relevant dataset, the holdings of JSTOR, and then to ingest those descriptions into an institutional repository. The repository will be an experimental version of DSpace installed on project specific hardware.
The Resource Maps will be structured so that the top level map will be a collection of issue aggregations, each issue a collection of articles and each article will have a map describing the resources associated with it (abstract, metadata, pdf, page images, raw text and so forth, as available). Any additional and available information could be included in the Resource Map graph, however the current ORE recommendations are to include only essential metadata (title, author, date, rights) and have a metadata file as part of the collection. The actual data for the articles is not included in the Resource Map, just a URI reference to it. This means that JSTOR still maintains control of all of its publishers' data, but the metadata is available in a computationally friendly manner.

Liverpool: Rob Sanderson (PI) (azaroth@liv.ac.uk)
HP Labs: Richard Jones
JSTOR: Clare Llewellyn