Hi Cameron, great blog! The ideas you propose in your blog are similar as I have seen being developed in the Netherlands by various institutions and supported by SURFfoundation. The joint effort of several Dutch universities have created a lot of knowledge and tools for creating so called "enhanced publications" which use OAI-ORE to describe the semantic relations between scientific web-resources.
read more: http://bit.ly/au3HkR

Yes, There are author tools for these aggregations! Many are domain specific, but one tool is generic that came out of the tender projects. see: http://escape.utwente.nl/ It is public so try and test yourself. If things go well there might be pilots running for creating aggregations during the publication process for open access journals, transferring the supplementary material to long term preservation archives and preserving the link interity by making use of persistent identifiers.

Work that needs to be done:
Regarding visualisations; we distinguish two kind of visualisations. 1. the visualisation of the data (like IBM's Many-Eyes, or Google's Gapminder) and 2. the visualisation of the aggregation/the relations interconnecting scientific web-resources. These visualisations could possibly be generically available in the near future using Rich Internet Applications, in order to embed in webpages. We are preparing to work in cooperation with several universities and institutions for semantic web and media design.

Regarding OAI-ORE Datamodeling: in order to create visualisations for generic use, like HTML, the RDF must be modelled according to specific rules. Also here several universities are working together to create a more strict standard, at least for generic use by the Dutch universities. Apart from these core set of rules there is room for extensions that describe the specific domain-related stuff. This then can easily be added in the RDF and used by domain specific visualisations.

Citing: for citing trusted scientific content that scales, millions of persistent identifiers can be used in the urn:nbn namespace, for publications, dataset, or even cells in a table. These id’s are minted by the national libraries who create a trusted information space, guaranteeing technical quality and persistence of the content. Using resolvers, persistent identifiers and a strongly committed preservation policy, the content can be independent for future (re-)location, duplication and future technology. These Persistent Identifiers make it ideal for Enhanced Publications to refer to scientific webcontent, creating trust and reassurance in future web-presence and availability of the digital content.

Link-back citation: scientific web-resources are themselves unaware they are used as part of an aggregation. The aggregation, created in an authoring or storage environment, should notify the resource that is has been used as part of the aggregation. This mechanism can be automated using the XML-RPC protocol for Ping-back, (less spam sensitive then track-back) which is also used in modern blog systems. The web-resource keeps track of the aggregations it is part of creating a ORE resource-map itself, with all the URI’s of the aggregations it is has been told to be a part of. Making use of ping-back, automatic citation discovery on resource level will occur.

Please do let me know what you think of these developments.