Interweaving OAI-PMH data sources with the linked data cloud

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) has found wide-spread adoption for exchanging bibliographic metadata. In parallel, the W3C’s Linked Data Initiative exposes and interlinks structured data from a variety of data sources on the Web. Since many of these data sources contain valuable information for institutional repositories (e.g., shared concept definitions, thesauri, etc.) we believe that institutions that currently expose their data via OAI-PMH can benefit if they integrate their metadata with the data available in the Linked Data cloud. To achieve such an integration, we must bridge the OAI-PMH specific protocol characteristics that currently prevent OAI-PMH metadata from being interoperable with the Linked Data approach of exposing data. As first contribution of this paper, we describe a possible solution for exposing OAI-PMH metadata on the Web as part of the Linked Data cloud. As a second contribution, we present a rule-based mechanism for linking these metadata with other relevant data sources together with a case study that describes possible linking scenarios for three representative OAI-PMH data providers. Finally, we discuss certain quality criteria that OAI-PMH metadata must meet in order to benefit from data exposed by other Linked Data sources.