Scott Yeadon wrote:

The access to materials and other services YouTube (et al) offer are 
available because they are able to base their product around a 
particular content class and no doubt have (a) defined content model(s) 
at the heart of their technical work. You can certainly have an abstract 
"stuff" repository but it doesn't allow you to do anything particularly 
useful with said "stuff". Until there is defined a set of content models 
for object classes which can be adopted by various communities in order 
that repositories, applications, services, etc can make sensible 
decisions on the submission, dissemination, management, curation etc of 
objects I don't see how the current situation will be changed.

It's telling to see Fedora 3.0 offer a content model architecture and 
that discussions on this are currently happening on the Fedora list, 
perhaps change is on it's way (or perhaps it will only occur in a single 
repository platform).

Scott.
> ------------------------------
>
> Date:    Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:52:12 +0000
> From:    Scott Wilson <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: List for learning object repositories?
>
> Exactly - Slideshare and YouTube are both "repositories". There is no  
> "repository abstraction layer". It would not be meaningful to make 
> one  (beyond the level of aggregating their RSS feeds, which I don't 
> think  really counts as creating a repository!).
>
> I think one of the big, big fundamental problems in repository-land  
> (both scholarly and learning resources) stems from what I think is a  
> mistaken belief that the "media doesn't matter" and that you *can*  
> have an abstract "stuff" repository.  Talk about making a rod for 
> your  own back!  ;-)
> S
>
>