# A nontechnical description of Open Metadata Exchange (OMEX)

The Open Metadata Exchange (OME) is designed to facilitate the sharing and exchange of metadata across different Open Education Resources (OER) libraries and platforms.

## Goals

- **Interoperability**: Enable different OER libraries to publish and subscribe to information about their resources.
- **Standardization**: A common metadata format will facilitate searching and sharing across numerous OER platforms.
- **Decentralized**: Ensure that metadata is stored in multiple locations to improve reliability and reduce reliance on any single source.
- **Scalability**: The system should be able to handle a growing number of resources and users without performance degradation.

Open Education Resources (OER) libraries have created a wealth of educational content but each system has its own editing tools and standards for subject classification, grade levels, author attribution, and more. This has created "islands of innovation" which makes discovery and sharing of resources difficult. The Open Metadata Exchange (OME) aims to solve this problem by providing a standardized way for OER libraries to share metadata about their resources.

The OME system will enable an OER library to **publish** information about its resources in a common format. Other OER libraries can then search and **subscribe** to this information and incorporate some or all of that information into their own systems. The OME network does not force any participant to share their information but enables those who choose to share to do so. We view this process as building bridges between the islands or innovation.

The OME system will use a decentralized architecture, meaning that metadata will be stored in multiple locations in the OME network. Currently many educational resources disappear because funding or organizational change reasons. By storing the information in multiple locations, OME ensures that resources remain discoverable even after repositories have been shut down.

The OME system is designed to gracefully handle growth. We want to numerous OER libraries and platforms to join this network without performance degradation.