Update on the Fedora Project

1
Update on the Fedora Project

• Common Solutions Group
• September 2005

Tim Sigmon University of Virginia Special
thanks to the Fedora Team for these slides!
2
Fedora Development Team

• Cornell University
• Sandy Payette (co-director)
• Chris Wilper
• Carl Lagoze
• Eddie Shin

• University of Virginia
• Thorny Staples (co-director)
• Ross Wayland
• Ronda Grizzle
• Bill Niebel
• Bob Haschart
• Tim Sigmon

3
Fedora Brief History

• Cornell Research (1997-present)
• DARPA and NSF-funded research
• First reference implementation developed
• Interoperable Repositories (experiments with
  CNRI)
• Policy Enforcement
• First Application (1999-2001)
• University of Virginia digital library prototype
• Technical implementation adapted to web RDBMS
  storage
• Scale/stress testing for 10,000,000 objects
• Open Source Software (2002-present)
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grants
• Technical implementation XML and web services
• Fedora 1.0 (May 2003)
• Fedora 2.0 (Jan 2005)
• Fedora 2.1 (coming soon!)

4
Known Use Cases forFedora Inside

• Digital Library Collections
• Institutional Repository
• Educational Software
• Information Network Overlay
• Digital Archives and Records Management
• Digital Asset Management
• File Cabinet / Document Management
• Scholarly publishing

5
Fedora Repository 2.x
6
The FedoraDigital Object Model
Service Perspective methods for disseminating
views of content
Item Perspective Set of content or metadata
items
Internal key metadata necessary to manage the
object
7
Fedora Repository 2.x
8
Fedora whats new(version 2.0)

• FOXML (Fedora Object XML)
• Simple XML format directly expresses Fedora
  object model
• Easily adapts to Fedora new and planned features
• Easily translated to other well-known formats
• Enhanced Ingest/Export of objects
• FOXML, METS (Fedora extension)
• Extensible to accommodate new XML formats
• Planned METS 1.4, MPEG21 DIDL

9
Fedora 2.0 (continued)

• Object-to-object Relationships
• Ontology of common relationships (RDF schema)
• Relationships stored in special datastream
  (RELS-EXT)
• Resource Index (RI)
• RDF-based index of repository (Kowari
  triple-store)
• Graph-based index includes
• Object properties and Dublin Core
• Object Relationships
• Object Disseminations
• RI Search (Search the repository as a graph)
• Powerful querying of graph of inter-related
  objects
• REST-based query interface (using RDQL or ITQL)
• Results in different formats (triples, tuples,
  sparql)

10
Fedora 2.0 (continued)

• New Utilities
• Batch Modify Utility
• Repository Administrator Reporting
• Performance Tuning (1 million objects)
• Ingest testing (800K objects 40 millisec/object)
• Concurrency testing (access requests)
• Communications and Outreach
• New Fedora Web Site
• Improved Documentation
• Tutorials

11
Preview Fedora 2.1 (Sept. 2005)

• ECL license
• Support for SSL
• Authentication plug-ins
• Tomcat realms and login modules
• Plug-in 1 Tomcat user/password file or
  database
• Plug-in 2 LDAP
• Plug-in 3 Radius Authentication
• Authorization module
• XML-based policies using XACML
• Repository-wide policies
• Object-specific policies
• Fine-grained policy enforcement
• API actions X subject attributes X object
  attributes

12
Authorization Example Policies

• Repository Policy
• Allow access to all API-M methods to
  administrator
• Allow access to the deleteDatastream method to
  author
• Specific Object Policy
• Allow access to object uva100 if user is
  Thorny.
• Group Object Policy
• Allow access to the getFullArticle
  dissemination of objects whose content model is
  journal-article if faculty
• Allow access to the secret datastream if user
  is not guest

13
Authorization Example Policies

• Time-oriented Policy
• Permit students access to answers datastream of
  learning object cs125 after May 15, 2005
• Deny all access to learning object cs125 after
  June 15, 2005
• Backend Service Security Policy
• Deny callback by external service represented by
  Bmech10

14
Preview of Fedora 2.1 (Sept. 2005)

• Enhanced OAI Provider Service (prOAI)
• Harvest multiple metadata formats
• Harvest datastreams and disseminations
• Support for incremental harvest by modified date
• Support for OAI sets
• Highly configurable via queries against Resource
  Index
• Directory Ingest Service (and client tool)
• Facilitate ingest of hierarchical directories of
  files
• Submit files as .zip or .jar (with a METS
  manifest)
• Automatically asserts parent-child relationships
  in RELS-EXT
• Stages content and ingests as FOXML objects into
  repository
• Policy Builder Client
• Simple user interface to create access policies
• Automatically generate XACML
• Handle Generation Plug-in (PIDs as Handles)

15
Fedora Service Framework(beginning Fedora 2.1)
16
Fedora Service Framework(2005-2006)
17
Fedora Service Framework(2006-2007)
18
Fedora Web-based IR Client

• Web-based client for institutional repository
• Configurable
• End-user submission
• Object creation template for content models
• Basic Workflow
• Search/Browse
• Easy configuration of access policy
• Development to begin this fall.

19
More Dev-Team Priorities

• Federated Repositories
• Federation with other repositories (DSpace,
  aDORE)
• note the Cornell/LANL NSF Pathways project.
• Fedora Showcase and News (on new website)
• Content Model Specification Language
• Advanced Object Creation Workbenches
• Tools for RDF browse and graph traversal
• Performance Tune millions of objects
• Web services security and Shibboleth
• Code Refactoring
• Fedora as web app (.war)
• MVC2 pattern for REST-based web exposures
• Other misc.

20
VTLS

• Commercial support and value-add development
• Similar to RedHat and Linux
• Installation, training, support, hosting, etc.
• VITAL product (based on Fedora) contains
  VTLS-developed work flow extensions, management
  utilities, and enhanced searching capabilities
• In partnership with the ARROW project, VTLS is
  developing and contributing back to open source,
  e.g.,
• Handles integration
• SRU/SRW interface to expose Fedora content
• Metadata extraction and content validation via
  JHOVE
• Automatic capture of technical metadata from
  images
• Facilitate content exposure to web crawlers
• Creating custom content models

21
ARROW

• Australian Research Repositories Online to the
  World
• Intention of the project is to achieve wider
  access to Australian research by making it
  available on-line with appropriate discovery
  facilities
• identify and test software or solutions to
  support best practice institutional digital
  repositories comprising e-prints, digital theses
  and electronic publishing
• Selected Fedora and VITAL as its core repository
  solutions
• http//arrow.edu.au

22
NSDL

• National Science Digital Library
• Mission improve Science, Math, and Engineering
  education through digital libraries
• First implementation was a metadata repository
  using Oracle dbms to hold information about
  collections and items.
• Next generation NSDL will use Fedora to add value
  to digital content ... don't just provide access.
• Create an information network overlay that
  supports
• Rich and dynamic information objects
• Information reuse/refactoring
• Graph-based information model (ontology-based
  relationships)
• Fine-grained access management
• http//www.nsdl.org

23
AGU Digital Archive

• American Geophysical Union (a publisher) is
  developing a system for long-term preservation
  (20, 50, even 100 yrs)
• Read the files
• Understand the structure of the files
• Ensure authentic copy of the work
• Selected Fedora based on an extensive list of
  requirements
• Emphasis on having good metadata
• Descriptive (author, title, volume, ...)
• Technical (formats, versions, ...)
• Administrative (rights, events, audits, ...)

24
Preservation of University Records

• Tufts and Yale received a grant from National
  Historical Publications and Records Commission
  (NHPRC)
• To synthesize electronic records preservation
  research with digital library repository research
  in an effort to develop systems capable of
  preserving university electronic records at both
  institutions
• To test the potential of Fedora to serve as the
  architecture for an electronic records
  preservation system.

25
www.fedora.info