Motivations for the Development of a Web Resource Synchronisation Framework

This article describes the motivations behind the development of the ResourceSync Framework. The Framework addresses the need to synchronise resources between Web sites. Resources cover a wide spectrum of types, such as metadata, digital objects, Web pages, or data files. There are many scenarios in which the ability to perform some form of synchronisation is required. Examples include aggregators such as Europeana that want to harvest and aggregate collections of resources, or preservation services that wish to archive Web sites as they change. Some of these use cases are described in this article, along with concrete examples of them in practice, together with issues that they may pose to the Framework as it is developed.