Introduction to Fedora

1
Introduction to Fedora
Developers' ForumIntegrated Access Council
March 29, 2005
Kevin L. Glick Electronic Records
Archivist Manuscripts and Archives Yale University
2
FlexibleExtensible Digital Object
RepositoryArchitecture
Kevin Glick Yale University
3
History of Fedora

• 1997-Present
• DARPA and NSF-funded research project at Cornell
  (Conceptual framework developed by Sandra Payette
  and Carl Lagoze)
• Reference implementation developed at Cornell
• 1999-2001
• University of Virginia digital library prototype
  (Thornton Staples and Ross Wayland)
• 2002-Present
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation granted Virginia and
  Cornell 1 million to develop a
  production-quality Fedora system
• Fedora 1.0 released in May 2003 as Open Source
  under the Mozilla public license Fedora 2.1

Kevin Glick Yale University
4
One View of Fedora
Delivery Application
Delivery Application
Ingest Tool
Search Tool
Ingest Tool
Search Tool
Access Tool
FEDORA
Kevin Glick Yale University
5
Fedora Digital Objects
Kevin Glick Yale University
6
Fedora Digital Object Model
Internal Metadata key metadata necessary to
manage the object
Kevin Glick Yale University
7
Types of Digital Objects

• Data Objects
• Behavior Definition Objects
• Behavior Mechanism Objects

Kevin Glick Yale University
8
Behaviors
9
Digital Object Example
Get Profile List Items/Get Item List Methods Get
OAI_DC
PID uva-lib100
Default Views
Image Views
Get Thumbnail Get Medium Get High
Metadata Views

• Multiple Disseminations

Image (mrsid)
DC (xml)
Thumbnail (jpeg)
Get MARC Get DC
Kevin Glick Yale University
10
Digital Object Storage
4 Properties for Datastreams
Fedora stores and manages the content bytestream
Fedora stores a reference (URL) to the content
Fedora stores a reference (URL) to the
content, but will not mediate access to content.
Fedora stores a name-spaced block of XML content
within the Fedora digital object XML file.
Kevin Glick Yale University
11
Repository SystemArchitecture and Software
Kevin Glick Yale University
12
Fedora Service Framework
Kevin Glick Yale University
13
Fedora Server Design 3 Layers
14
Fedora Repository
Kevin Glick Yale University
15
Fedora Repository System
Client and Web Service Interactions
Back-end
Front-end
Fedora Repository
Content Transform Service
client application
user
client application
Service
Web Service
Web Service Dispatch
Content Transform Service
user
web browser
Service
Kevin Glick Yale University
16
Whats Different about Fedora

• Supports complex objects, not document centric
• Developer-focused versus user-focused
• Requires Development resources
• Metadata and the content treated the same way
• Supports any metadata schema (standard or
  non-standard)
• Import/Export Utility
• Designed for federation

Kevin Glick Yale University