Abstract
"This paper describes the work of the Object Re-Use and Exchange (ORE) project of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) to develop one component of this new infrastructure in order to support the revolutionized scholarly communication paradigm – standards to facilitate discovery, use and re-use of new types of compound scholarly communication units by networked services and applications. Compound units are aggregations of distinct information units that, when combined, form a logical whole. Some examples of these are a digitized book that is an aggregation of chapters, where each chapter is an aggregation of scanned pages, and a scholarly publication that is an aggregation of text and supporting materials such as datasets, software tools, and video recordings of an experiment. The ORE work aims to develop mechanisms for representing and referencing compound information units in a machine-readable manner that is independent of both the actual content of the information unit and nature of the re-using application."