Comments on: Processing Raw Fedora Objects

By: Leslie

Leslie — Wed, 03 May 2006 18:20:58 +0000

I should clarify that we don’t do this with the raw Fedora XML objects, but with the externally managed datastreams. I think the principle is much the same and could work with the raw objects.

By: Leslie

Leslie — Wed, 03 May 2006 18:18:22 +0000

Since we keep copies of the xml files for our externally referenced datastreams in the file system, we have built our discovery interface at UVA using XPAT outside of Fedora, with Cocoon as the middleware. We have very rich metadata extracted from our objects programatically, much richer than what’s in Fedora; we also provide full text searching of the TEI or EAD that way as well. As an example, a user uses the web interface to search the XPAT index. He finds an object that he wants to see. When he clicks on it, a parameterized URL is passed through Cocoon that formats a call for Fedora to disseminate the object.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 03 May 2006 17:41:45 +0000

Thanks for the props, Peter.

In fact, Fedora does serialize the XML back to the FOXML file on disk for every change, including appropriate changes to the administrative metadata section for audit trails. This was a requirement for us at Rutgers as one of our goals for the repository was digital preservation.

A tiny caveat: this used to be the case, at least, under Fedora 1.2 when they used Fedora-METS. I’m 99% confident that this is still the case under Fedora 2.x w/ FOXML — it seems to be a core feature of Fedora that the serialized XML objects are complete. Sure, there’s stuff in the db and the triplestore, but that’s all extracted from the XML. We’d been using Fedora since about 0.9 or so, way before much of its advanced functionality started appearing in official releases, so we had lots of experience going under the hood of Fedora (esp. for searching & repository synchronization).

That’s part of its beauty — the stuff under the hood is relatively undaunting. And it’s not got the black-boxish feel that other information systems do.

Hopefully we’ll start to see others blog about their Fedora experiences. Maybe this would be a good topic (for Sandy or Thorny?) at the Fedora Users Conference — building the Fedora community through the Wiki, the #fedora-users IRC channel, and through bloggers.