ResourceSync - National Information Standards Organization

Use the link to access more information about ResourceSync. A brief overview reads as follows: “ResourceSync will research, develop, prototype, test, and deploy mechanisms for the large-scale synchronization of web resources. ResourceSync is a joint cooperation between NISO and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) team, with work funded by the Sloan Foundation2. 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availability of content available from these repositories, as well as alleviate the variety of problems created by outdated, inaccurate, superseded content that exists on the Internet.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. The ResourceSync working group was formed in late 2011. As 2012 progresses, these pages will be updated with more information about the specific plans and activities.”