How can a web object have a defined meaning in the context of the objects discovered at the same site, a group of different objects with which it was sold at auction, and yet other objects displayed in the same museum exhibition years later, when each of the individual objects will have one or many URI’s and representations on the Web?

How, in other words, can the meanings of different aggregations of digital objects be retained over time?

The Open Archives Initiative – Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI- ORE) specification, which has been under development for about two years and was released this week for public comment (see http://www.openarchives.org/ore/0.1/toc ), provides the framework for a standard way to represent these relations and make both the meta-entities and the digital individual components available for reuse and interchange. The approach taken is consistent with the Resource Description Framework (RDF), and OWL, the Web Ontology Language. Given the widespread acceptance of OAI in academia, and the status of the authors of this draft, there is good reason to believe that ORE will have a significant impact on metadata exchange of complex web objects in the future, and thereby contribute yet another building block to the future of the Semantic Web. Hopefully the museum community will read and comment on the current draft to ensure that its needs are satisfied by the proposal. My quick reading suggests that a full range of temporary associations and permanent properties of complex objects can be represented usefully and without too great an overhead.