Jeff Merriman from MIT is talking about the OKI Repository OSIDs.
Jeff makes the distingtion between Data Specifications, Interface specifications, and protocol specifications as separate parts of interoperability that should be separated out explicitly.
The Repository OSID is a Service Interface only – it’s silent on protocol/access technology. There are Java, PHP, and Objective-C instantiations of the binding. The spec is supportive of various metadata through “typing”.
Jeff demonstrated a number of applications searching and retrieving data from a range of disparate repositories using the OSIDs. One compelling application is the Vue2 image-enabled concept mapping tool, which allows hierarchical narratives as presentations.
Documentation is online at http://www.okiproject.org/specs/osid_12.html
In response to a question about the relationship between this Repository OSID and the JSR170 content management spec, Jeff talked about how the OSID is more narrowly focused (JSR170 includes things like workflow that will be in other OSIDs), but that it should be possible to map from one to the other and they plan to work on that at some point.
Oren Sreebny 