Fedora: an architecture for complex objects and their relationships

Abstract

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 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.

Scholarly primitives: Building institutional infrastructure for humanities e-Science

“…Collecting complex digital content in repositories and related systems is a field that is both well-researched and widely practised (see, e.g., [14]). However, the creation of the contextual information or metadata required to discover and use this content, or even to understand it, raises significant practical issues of scalability, as in general this work requires professional staff with particular domain knowledge.…”

“…While this may be useful in the context of these social websites, it is be too libertarian and open to misuse to produce results that are acceptable in more formal cultural heritage environments. For example, the 'steve' project 14 , a collaboration between cultural heritage organisations in the USA, tried this approach with rather mixed results, finding that the terminology used for tagging was too loosely connected with the sort of terms used by the cultural heritage community to form an effective basis for searching.…”

“…This is based on the Fedora Commons software 17 , which specifically aims at managing complex digital resources with interrelationships between objects [14]. While we have been investigating and applying Fedora for some time, and not only in the humanities, we are currently undertaking a project CMES 18 , funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council 19 , which is taking a systematic approach to the development of patterns for digital humanities content.…”

A framework for manipulating and searching multiple retrieval types

“…Design, Human Factors, Standardization Keywords Proteus, object search, navigation The idea of browsing over different types of information has been explored by various web sites and researchers for some time [1,2]. Most efforts to date either collapse the types into one retrieval list or only use boolean-matching queries.…”

eSciDoc Infrastructure: A Fedora-Based e-Research Framework

“…Fedora (Lagoze, Payette, Shin, & Wilper, 2005), the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository, is a renowned solution for all kinds of applications, including e-Research use cases. Fedora is the repository underneath the eSciDoc Infrastructure, and it already provides many features to address the above mentioned challenges.…”