DS CWA 16097:2010

The Simple Publishing Interface (SPI) Specification

Scope

This CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) presents the Simple Publishing Interface (SPI), a protocol for publishing digital objects or their metadata to repositories. This protocol is designed to facilitate the transfer of metadata and content from tools that produce learning materials to applications that manage learning objects and metadata, but is also applicable to the publication of a wider range of digital objects.

The objective is to develop a practical approach towards interoperability between repositories for learning and applications that produce or consume educational materials. Examples of repositories for learning are educational brokers, knowledge pools, institutional repositories, streaming video servers, etc. Applications that produce these educational materials are for instance query and indexation tools, authoring tools, presentation programs, content packagers, etc. The work will concentrate on the development of the simple publishing interface (SPI), an interface for publishing digital materials into a repository. Whilst the development of the SPI specification draws exclusively on examples from the education sector, it is recognised that the underlying requirement to publish content and metadata into repositories crosses multiple sectors.

The following section presents some important requirements for this work. Next, the SPI model enumerates the different messages that are interchanged when publishing metadata and content. This model has been designed such that it is interoperable with v1.3 Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) profile [SWORD], Package Exchange Notification Services [PENS] and the publishing specification that was developed in the ProLearn Network of Excellence [PROLEARN SPI]. The intent of this work is thus not to create yet another specification but to create a model that can be bound to existing technologies.