Fedora discussion

Friday the DRC-Dev team discussed the underpinnings of Fedora, the platform selected for creating the Digital Resource Commons. The presentation method itself was interesting, using Elluminate software available through the Ohio Learning Network (OLN) to push information on a whiteboard to remote users and allow discussion and text messaging among participants. The process was definitely successful.

We learned about Fedora's digital object model, with four components: a DOI or handle as identifier; methods to disseminate or view the object; content; and system metadata. And there are four content types: managed, external (like a URL), redirects to other sites, and XML. The overall architecture consists of an interface (web service plus OAI provider); application logic in Java; storage, a relational database management system (RDBMS).

There are more acronyms and terms to learn and/or review:
digital object serialization defined by XML schema
extensible = can associate services with objects
extensible object model
DOI and handle
OAI-DC
SOAP-based versus web-based
web service
server container package

University of Virginia is deveping for digital archive application. See http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/resndev/fedora.html .
Their archive using Fedora? http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/collections/image/

A May 2005 Users Group conference hosted 110 implementers with objects as diverse as streaming data from a temperature sensor.