Sandra Payette

Fedora: an architecture for complex objects and their relationships

The Fedora architecture is an extensible framework for the storage, management, and dissemination of complex objects and the relationships among them. Fedora accommodates the aggregation of local and distributed content into digital objects and the association of services with objects. This allows an object to have several accessible representations, some of them dynamically produced. The architecture includes a generic Resource Description Framework (RDF)-based relationship model that represents relationships among objects and their components. Queries against these relationships are supported by an RDF triple store. The architecture is implemented as a web service, with all aspects of the complex object architecture and related management functions exposed through REST and SOAP interfaces. The implementation is available as open-source software, providing the foundation for a variety of end-user applications for digital libraries, archives, institutional repositories, and learning object systems.

Flexible and Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (FEDORA)

We describe a digital object and respository architecture for storing and disseminating digital library content. The key features of the architecture are: (1) support for heterogeneous data types; (2) accommodation of new types as they emerge; (3) aggregation of mixed, possibly distributed, data into complex objects; (4) the ability to specify multiple content disseminations of these objects; and (5) the ability to associate rights management schemes with these disseminations. This architecture is being implemented in the context of a broader research project to develop next-generation service modules for a layered digital library architecture.

Supporting scholarly inquiry: Incorporating users in the design of the digital library

Abstract A digital library that effectively supports scholarly users must address the behaviors and activities of users engaged in research. Using focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and questionnaires, this study concludes that scholars will benefit from adaptive, flexible user interfaces that enable easy navigation of a complex information landscape.

Policy-Carrying, Policy-Enforcing Digital Objects

We describe the motivation for moving policy enforcement for access control down to the digital object level. The reasons for this include handling of item-specific behaviors, adapting to evolution of digital objects, and permitting objects to move among repositories and portable devices. We then describe our experiments that integrate the Fedora architecture for digital objects and repositories and the PoET implementation of security automata to effect such object-centric policy enforcement.

The Mellon Fedora Project Digital Library Architecture Meets XML and Web Services

The University of Virginia received a grant of

A metadata architecture for digital libraries

1,000,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to enable the Library, in collaboration with Cornell University, to build a digital object repository system based on the Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (Fedora). The new system demonstrates how distributed digital library architecture can be deployed using web-based technologies, including XML and Web services. The new system is designed to be a foundation upon which interoperable web-based digital libraries can be built. Virginia and collaborating partners in the US and UK will evaluate the system using a diverse set of digital collections. The software will be made available to the public as an open-source release.

Making global digital libraries work: collection services, connectivity regions, and collection views

From an architectural perspective, there is no essential distinction between data and metadata. Both can be represented in distributed active relationships (DARs), which are an extension of the Warwick framework (C. Lagoze et al., 1996). The DAR model is a powerful way to express relationships between networked resources and to allow such relationships to be dynamically downloadable and executable.

The Fedora Project: An Open-source Digital Object Repository Management System

There are many technical challenges in designing the architecture of globally-distributed, federated digital libraries. This paper focuses on the problem of global resource discovery and describes a service architecture and server topology for improving the performance and reliability of that process. The technique described is based on three concepts. Connectivity regions are groups of sites with relatively good network connectivity. Collection services provide the necessary metainformation so that a group of digital library servers can interoperate as a collection. Collection views represent the configuration of the collection that conforms to connectivity regions. The work that is described here is based on experience with the NCSTRL international digital library of computer science research and is implemented as part of the Dienst architecture upon which NCSTRL is based.