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Links between Digital Objects

Links between digital objects, originally a convenient mechanism to organise and navigate resources, are turning into a core digital object of its own when it comes to securing the long term access and preservation of linked resources.

This obviously applies to web pages, but more broadly to documents that display dependencies with a wealth of contextual resources. 

XML today plays a central role in dealing with linked resources as its underlying syntax explicitly embeds universal references (URI, URL, IRI, etc.) that open the content towards any type of reference-driven application. The formal standardized nature of XML references encouraged a wide technical and conceptual acceptance of XML as a paradigm of choice to manage linked resources.

There are currently two different ways (inside the XML standard) for identifying and designating items inside or outside a document. The first one is based on ID/IDREF mechanisms which only apply to intra-document references. The second one, more general, is based on URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that has been historically derived into several variants (e.g. URI, uniform resource identifiers; IRI, internationalized resource identifier; URN Uniform resource name), each having different intended use and slight lexical variations.

The current prototype focuses on the second kind of references: URL designating items outside of the XML document.

Dissemination of Content

The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim at facilitating the efficient dissemination of content. In particular it has defined one standard of interest for this infrastructure: the Object reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE).

The ORE standard defines how to describe and exchange aggregation of Web ressources, using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which forms the foundational data model of the semantic web.

 Links + Dissemination = XeQual !

XeQual offers a means:

1. to discover, in a disciplined manner, how XML resources are linked to each other;
2. to describe, in a standardized manner, these resources viewed as an aggregation;
3. to store this information and publish it in RDF, a la semantic web.

Where to go next?

Technology Under the Hood 

XRM is a XML language dedicated to locate, validate and extract links in a XML resource. See our publication entitled "Managing XML references through the XRM vocabulary" by Jean-Yves Vion-Dury published at Balisage 2009.

eXist is an open source native XML database, which we use as platform for our prototype (Try it!).

Acknowledgements:

This work is supported by the Large Scale Integrating Project SHAMAN, co-funded under the EU 7th Framework Programme ( http://shaman-ip.eu/shaman ).

Open Xerox is a web portal that hosts technology prototypes from the Xerox R&D labs, making them accessible to the external user community well before the launch of a product offering.

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