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A Walk Along the Fedora Commons
Carol Minton Morris
Communications and Media Director
Fedora Commons
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
• Setting the stage for Fedora Commons:
Scholars of the future
• A few facts about why 12,000 users and
‘swampworks’ testers downloaded Fedora in
the last 6 months
• The community, ten Fedora Commons partners
and ten reasons why
• Towards a solution-bundle future
• Questions
A look back
• Fedora
Flexible
Extensible
Digital
Object
Repository
Architecture
A look back
• A Cornell University research project, 1997-2002
DARPA and NSF-funded research and
reference implementations
Distributed, interoperable repositories
(experiments with CNRI)
• Open Source development project, 2002-2007
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2002-2009
Joint development by Cornell University
and University of Virginia
• Fedora Commons non-profit organization,
summer2007
New grant from Gordon and Betty Moore
Foundation, 4.9M over four years
Fedora Commons is the home of Fedora software,
an open access template for technologies at the
forefront of global change in social and scholarly
communications as an information layer over
durable resources.
“At present, scholarship is largely the domain
of professional specialists, most of whom work
as academics in universities, research institutes,
and museums.”
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_method>
Let’s look at who the scholars of the future are,
right now.
Future scholars exist in a
world of rich collaboration
on and offline that
extends far beyond the
borders of formal
education.
Working together is the
the best way they know
to get answers in any
context.
Interacting in many
situations, with different
forms of entertainment,
communications, and
consumer web sites
while using multiple
technologies
is just another day in
the life of future scholars.
Networked multiplayer
online game environments
and virtual worlds will
evolve into new spaces
for scholarship taking
scholars of the future
along for a ride to
new paradigms for
creating knowledge.
Fedora, the flexible, extensible, digital object repository
architecture, enables the creation of durable, reusable
and independent resources for a new kind of scholar
who does not yet know how they will be used to create
warranted knowledge in the future.
• Setting the stage for Fedora Commons:
Scholars of the future
• A few facts about why 12,000 users and
‘swampworks’ testers downloaded Fedora in
the last 6 months
• The community, ten Fedora Commons partners
and ten reasons why
• Towards a solution-bundle future
• Questions
“Fedora Commons provides sustainable
technologies to create, manage, publish, share
and preserve digital content as a basis for
intellectual, organizational, scientific and
cultural heritage by bringing communities
of practice together with software developers.”
<http://http://www.fedora-commons.org/>
Target Use Cases
• Digital libraries and knowledge spaces
Some idea of contextual content that
is about and related to a body of resources, and
that adds meaning and value to those aggregated
resources.
Target Use Cases
• New models of publication
Using a related aggregation of various types of
content and context to create warranted knowledge
Integrated information networks
Fedora Commons is at the intersection of key
social and technical trends:
Open Scholarly Contexts
Technical Contexts
scholarly publication
service-oriented
e-scholarship
collaborative digital library
e-science
museums
web 2.0
semantic web
web 3.0
Technology goals in support of key social and technical
trends
1. Support the creation and publication of new forms of
“information units” (e.g., compound entities; data and publications)
2. Knowledge integration: capturing semantic and factual
relationships among information entities
3. Promote information re-use and contextualization
4. Accommodate information that is created as a byproduct of
collaborative activity
5. Integrate with institutional and enterprise systems that
Support research, collaboration, and scholarly communication
(e.g., workflow)
6. Enable preservation and archiving of digital materials to ensure
Sustainability and durability of digital information resources.
• Setting the stage for Fedora Commons:
Scholars of the future
• A few facts about why 12,000 users and
‘swampworks’ testers downloaded Fedora in
the last 6 months
• The community, ten Fedora Commons partners
and ten reasons why
• Towards a solution-bundle future
• Questions
The Fedora Commons community consists
of:
Consortia
Corporations
Government Agencies
Medical Centers
National Libraries and Archives
Professional Societies
Publishers
Research Groups and Projects
Virtual Library Projects
University IT Departments
University Libraries and Archives
In 2006 the Fedora Outreach Group
conducted a survey to find out more about
the community
•Target group: 45 known Fedora projects
•Timeframe: August - November 2006
•30% response rate
•Additional data from the 2005 User Survey was
used as background for analysis
Highlights
Q: Why did you chose Fedora?
1.
Flexible, extensible, open
2.
An architecture to build on
3.
Institutional and consortium need to work with open
source software
4.
Peer development opportunities
5.
Service-based architecture
6.
Technical evaluation of appropriateness for research
repositories
Highlights
Q: Were there economic advantages to your project/org. in
selecting Fedora?
The majority of respondents liked working with Open
Source software, but saving money was not the prime
motivator in deciding to use Fedora. This is particularly
true for large national projects and consortia who are
more interested in “freedom and autonomy” and
building out systems to meet specific requirements.
“Fedora is future proof.”
1. Store whatever you want.
From journal articles, images, data sets, learning objects,
and any combination of part of piece of the above,
The Arrow Project is using Fedora to establish a repository
to meet the Australian Government’s need to track
research output from its universities now and
into the future.
“It (Fedora) was
chosen as it offered
in our view the most
flexible, extensible
structure in which to
manage a wide
variety of digital
objects, with
proven scalability
and support for
the OAI-PMH
protocol.”
2. Easy Access
Fedora enables you to flexibly access your content (or just
parts of it) so you and your collaborators can easily use, fuse
mash-up,and repurpose it in new and innovative ways.
Like many other Fedora projects a key aspect of The University
of Virginia Library’s goal was to ensure that their digital
collections would be preserved and available to scholars, perhaps
In novel ways, into the future.
“Fedora was
chosen because it
was architected
to facilitate
handling of
complex objects.”
3. Express Relationships
The connections between content items can be captured and
stored in Fedora as semantic relationships describing both the
linkage and its meaning. The National Science Digital Library
(NSDL) Is using Fedora to create a semantic educational layer
on top of over 2.5 M objects in the repository.
NSDL made the
decision to build a
Fedora-based
technical platform
to enable user
participation and
collaboration
across over 200
partner digital
libraries and other
science,
technology,
engineering, and
mathematics
discipline
communities in
support of NSDL’s
educational
mission.
Executive Director Kaye Howe explained the evolving semantic
digital library and her willingness to “risk” the investment of resources
this way during her plenary address to Fedora users
at the 2007 Open Repositories Conference:
“The clarity of metadata did not reflect the richness of intellectual
inquiry.” In Howe’s view context and relativism are more important
in pursuit of scholarship and do not diminish the fundamental nature
of the intellectual enterprise. She sees Fedora as being analogous to
the complexity of our collective intellectual enterprise, and at the
center of intellectual empowerment in ‘NSDL 2.0.’”
4. Free open source software
Most projects implement Fedora for other reasons, However
CARL, The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries looked
for and found a service-oriented architecture that was also
an open source product with an active community in Fedora.
“We are paying
to have more
staff to do a
Fedora
implementation
rather than paying
for software
licensing fees.
We also knew that
we would have
new libraries and
new museums
joining our
consortium
(currently 11
partners). As they
join we want to
be able to add
them easily.”
5. Enables Permanence
Institutions such as the National Library of Wales have at
the heart of their mission a critical need to preserve language and
cultural heritage. Other Fedora projects such as Forced Migration
Online (FMO), a digital repository of scholarly resources based
at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, provide
services for users who count on the information being
available when they need it. For projects like these
permanence, durability, flexibility of Fedora digital objects is
as important as preserving physical objects in buildings.
6. A supportive community
The fact that you can get and answer on the fedora users
list almost anytime, in any time zone, is a tribute to the
community and a reason why small projects like Rhodes College
were able to effectively use Fedora in day-to-day production.
“Fedora is Rhodes
College's office,
production digital
repository system.
It is currently being
used to store and
describe digital
objects that are
part of the
Crossroads to
Freedom project,
which is a special
initiative overseen
by Rhodes that
links a digital
archive of Civil
Rights materials
from Memphis
to community
engagement
and education.”
7. Extensibility
Large and significant collections of rich media--images, video,
mutlimedia are often housed in legacy systems that are difficult
to manage and access. The Sloan Kettering Surgery Department
plans to migrate their collections of rich media to a Fedora
repository to provide doctors and patients better access to
critical care data by utilizing Fedora’s extensible data model.
“The main
advantage
of Fedora is that
the design of the
system is very
clean and beautiful.
Objects with
disseminatiors
were very
appealing
because of the
types of content
I manage. The
main advantage
was technical-digital object
independence
was important.”
8. Maturity
The upcoming release of Fedora 3.0 will be the eleventh
release of the software since 2003. The maturity and
vigor of both the core platform and the community that
has contributed to its adoption is a key reason that
large national projects like eSciDoc, a shared project of
the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe, funded by the
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)
are using Fedora to solve data access and management issues.
“Interoperability is
a must, and is
reflected in the
architecture in the
form of numerous
APIs, import
and export
interfaces and the
comprehensive
use of standards.
Fedora's object
storage layer is a
central and critical
component of
the eSciDoc
framework.”
9. Scalability, both large and small
Using Fedora developers can build a system that scales from
a single-server to a large organizational multi-server system.
The Encyclopedia of Chicago, a project of the Chicago History
Museum and Northwestern University was one of the first
Fedora implementations and originally contained only
1,500 items plus images.
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/
“Fedora allowed us
to formalize
object types and
disseminations and
de-couple data from
access while
providing a stable
API for displaying
and using
information. Fedora
brings just a little
more discipline to
how you describe
objects.”
10. Fedora is an engine for innovation
While Rob Chavez was at Tufts, where Fedora is used to
manage their digital collections, he experimented with using
Fedora to disseminate their content in a way that
Google Earth could use:
The content itself can aggregate even more Fedora
managed content
Fedora allows repository managers to model and
manage data in such a way that we can use familiar tools
(i.e. Google Earth) to access and provide context for
loads of Fedora managed data.
Next steps: to use the same tools to aggregate this
data temporally (time and space browser of Fedora data);
to manipulate the data and push it back to Fedora.
• Setting the stage for Fedora Commons:
Scholars of the future
• A few facts about why 12,000 users and
‘swampworks’ testers downloaded Fedora in
the last 6 months
• The community, ten Fedora Commons partners
and ten reasons why
• Towards a solution-bundle future
• Questions
Technology goals in support of key social and technical
trends
1. Support the creation and publication of new forms of
“information units” (e.g., compound entities; data and publications)
2. Knowledge integration: capturing semantic and factual
relationships among information entities
3. Promote information re-use and contextualization
4. Accommodate information that is created as a byproduct of
collaborative activity
5. Integrate with institutional and enterprise systems that
Support research, collaboration, and scholarly communication
(e.g., workflow)
6. Enable preservation and archiving of digital materials to ensure
Sustainability and durability of digital information resources.
Questions?
Open Repositories 2008--Call will be out soon!
Contacts
Dan Davis, Chief Software Architect, Fedora Commons
[email protected] (607) 255-6090
Carol Minton Morris, Communications and Media Director
cmmorris@ fedora-commons.org (607) 255-2702