Sakai Fedora Tool

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Sakai Fedora Tool

• Beth Kirschner
• University of Michigan
• beth.kirschner_at_umich.edu

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Overview

• Background
• Sakai
• Fedora
• Flexible Content Model
• Tool Actions
• Object Relationships
• Generic Search Service
• Security Authorization
• Possibilities with Disseminators

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Background

• eResearch Projects need a collaboration framework
  (e.g. Sakai)
• eResearch Projects need a data repository (e.g.
  Fedora)
• Some sample projects with these requirements
• NEES (Network for Earthquake Engineering
  Simulation)
• MAE (Mid-America Earthquake Center)
• Situation Awareness CyberTerrorism/Crime
  Investigation for NCSA
• The Sakai-Fedora-Tool provides a generic
  framework to support different eResearch data
  models within Sakai.

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What is Sakai?

• A projecta higher education initiative supported
  by a two-year Mellon grant.
• A communityan international alliance of
  institutions of higher education, commercial
  affiliates and committed individuals committed to
  a community source model of software development.
• A foundationa non-profit, member-supported
  organization created to serve the Sakai
  community.
• A framework and toolsan extensible Java-based
  enterprise framework for building collaborative
  teaching and research tools and services.
• An iron chefthe famous Hiroyuki Sakai

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Sakai Distributed Development
The Sakai 2.1 release constitutes an
international initiative by an expanding
community.
Developers

• Individual committers 36
• Institutions of higher-ed represented 10
• Commercial affiliates represented 2
• Continents represented 4
• (North America, Europe, Asia, Africa)

QA

• Individuals Testers 52
• Institutions of higher-ed represented 27
• Countries represented 6
• (Portugal, South Africa, Sweden, The
  Netherlands, UK, USA)

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Sakai Academic Institutions
Sakai commuSakai Academic Institunni
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Sakai Partners and Commercial Affiliates (SCA)
Sakai community
Partners and commercial affiliates (SCA)
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Why we like Fedora

• Performance
• Scalability
• Security
• Searchability
• Web Services
• Flexible data models

• Many adopters
• Open Source
• Disseminators
• Audit Trail
• Versioning

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Flexible Content Model

• SAKAI datastream reserved for XML metadata
• Metadata viewed by XSLT transformation
• Metadata constrained by any defined XSD
• Metadata edited in HTML form created from XSD
• All other non-reserved datastreams contain data
• Different objects can have different schemas
• Different data models can have different data
  relationships

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XSL Template
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Browse View (Project)
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Browse View (Experiment)
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XML Schema
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Edit View (Project)
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Browse View
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Annotated Browse View
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Tool Actions

• searchXml - Fedora Generic Search Service search
  metadata
• searchDc - Fedora Access Service searches Dublin
  Core
• resumeSearch - continues a previous search
• browseObj - view metadata of (parent) object
  related children
• formNewOb - transforms XSD schema into an HTML
  form
• saveNewObj - validate and save new metadata
• formEditObj - transforms XSD schema into an HTML
  form populated with existing metadata
• saveEditObj - validate and save modified metadata
• addData - add new datastream, with data or a data
  reference

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Object Relationships

• Simple parent-child relationships can be
  represented using the Dublin Core
• Fedora indexes Dublin Core metadata
• More complex ontologies can use RDF
• Fedora indexes RDF metadata (RELS-EXT datastream)
  using Kowari

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Object Relationships Dublin Core
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Object Relationships RDF
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Generic Search Service

• Problem Fedora only indexes DC RELS-EXT
• Solution Gert Schmeltz Pedersens Search Service
• Web Services interface
• Lucene (or Zebra) index and search engine
• Fielded searches against SAKAI datastream
• Wildcard searches, fuzzy searches, proximity
  searches, range searches and boolean operators
• For more information http//defxws2006.cvt.dk/fed
  oragsearch/

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Fielded Search
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Full-Text Searching
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Security Authorization

• Fedora 2.1 introduced extensible support for
  authentication authorization
• Customize Fedora Servers Tomcat JAAS (Java
  Authentication and Authorization Service)
• Add Sakai JAAS Realm for authentication
• Pull Sakai User attributes for authorization
• Fedora uses the Sun XACML policy engine
• Customize XACML Policies

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Possibilities with Disseminators

• Fedora Disseminators allow data transformation
• Research applications use various data formats
• Federated searching (SRU/SRW) is already
  incorporated in many Sakai applications
• Seamless search, transform, and view

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Sakai Visualization Tool using Fedora
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Questions?