Today was the second day of the Open Repositories conference, and the big highlight of the day for me was the panel discussion on using Fedora as a storage and service layer for DSpace. This seems like such a natural fit, but with two pieces of complex software the devil is in the details. Below that summary is some brief paragraphs about some of the 24×7 lightning talks.
This week I am attending the Open Repositories conference in Austin, Texas, and yesterday was the second preconference day (and the first day I was in Austin). Coming in as I did I only had time to attend two preconference sessions: one on the integration — or maybe “invasion” of the Spring Framework — into DSpace and one on the introduction of the DuraCloud service and code.
There was a time when I was moving in both the worlds of the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment and the Fedora Commons digital content repository. It seemed like a good idea to bring these two worlds together — Fedora as a content repository for Sakai learning objects. Back in 2006, I logged a ticket in Sakai’s tracker to see if anyone was interested. This morning I got notification that they are thinking of closing the ticket.
The past few weeks have seen announcements of large digital preservation programs. I find it interesting that the National Science Foundation is involved in both of them.
I’ve been working to get JBoss Seam tied into Fedora, and along the way thought it would be wise to stop and document a core concept of this integration: the centrality of Fedora Disseminators in the the design of the Ohio Digital Resource Commons. Although there is nothing specific to JBoss Seam (a Java Enterprise Edition application framework) in these concepts, making an object “render itself” does make the Seam-based interface application easier to code and understand. A disseminator-centric architecture also allows us to put our code investment where it matters the most — in the repository framework — and exploit that investment in many places. So what does it mean to have a disseminator-centric architecture and have objects “render themselves”?
Chris Wilper gave this presentation on behalf of the work that he and Aaron Birkland did to improve the performance of the Fedora Resource Index.
Version 2.0 of the Fedora digital object repository software added a feature called the Resource Index (RI). Based on Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples, the RI provided quick access to relationships between objects as well as to the descriptive elements of the object itself. After about two years of use using the Kowari software, the RI has pointed to a number of challenges for “triplestores”: scalability (few triplestores are designed for greater than 100 million triples); performance; and stability (frequent “rebuilds”).
This is a summary of a presentation by James L. Hilton, Vice President and CIO of University of Virginia, at the opening keynote session of Open Repositories 2007. I tried to capture the esessence of his presentation, and omissions, contradictions, and inaccuracies in this summary are likely mine and not that of the presenter.
This is a moment in which institutions may be willing to invest in open source development in a systematic way (as opposed to what could currently be characterized as an ad hoc fashion) driven by these factors:
This morning, Sandy Payette of Cornell University and FEDORA project co-director, gave an update on the FEDORA project including a statement of a vision for FEDORA’s future, information about the emerging FEDORA Commons non-profit, and a status report/roadmap for the software itself. Below is a summary based on my notes of Sandy’s comments and slide content.
From her perspective, Sandy sees many kinds of projects using FEDORA, and she sees them fall into these general categories: Scholarly Workbenches — capturing, managing and publishing the process of scholarship; Linking Data and Publications — complex objects built up of relationships with different types of internal and external objects; Reviews and Annotations of Objects — blogs and wikis on top of information spaces; collaborations surrounding a repository object; and Museum Exhibits with K-12 Lesson Plans.
Below is the outline of the Ohio DRC presentation from today’s FEDORA session at Open Repositories conference. Comments welcome!
This tour is designed to show the overall architecture of a FEDORA digital object repository application within the JBoss Seam framework while at the same time pointing out individual design decisions and extension points that are specific to the Ohio Digital Resource Commons application. Geared towards software developers, a familiarity with Java Servlet programming is assumed, although not required. Knowledge of JBoss Seam, Hibernate/Java Persistence API, EJB3 and Java EE would be helpful but not required; brief explanations of core concepts of these technologies are included in this tour.
The tour is based on revision 709 of /drc/trunk and was last updated on 18-Jan-2007.