In case it is not evident, this Vision Document describes a longer-term vision for the DSpace platform.  It does NOT have any relationship to the DSpace 4.0 Release in 2013 or the DSpace 5.0 release scheduled for end of 2014.  Both DSpace 4.0 and 5.0 will just involve improvements to the existing DSpace platform. This Vision Document describes DSpace software's "aspirations" or the overarching goals which DSpace will strive to achieve.

 The latest Vision-related work (as of June 2014) is occurring at:

 

DSpace 3-5 Year Vision Statement

A presentation version of this Vision Statement is also available at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ioj3j77iuit0hlk/DSpace%20vision.pdf

The following statements describe, at a high level, what goals the DSpace open source product should strive to meet.

  1. DSpace will focus on the fundamentals of the modern "Institutional Repository" use case. We are striving to meet the IR needs of the next 5-10 years.
  2. DSpace will be "lean", with agility and flexibility as primary goals.
  3. DSpace will include a "core" set of functionality that can be "extended" (think plugins) or have "hooks" (integration points) to complimentary services/tools
  4. DSpace will be designed in such a way that it can be easily/quickly configured to integrate with new & future tools/services in the larger digital scholarship "ecosystem"
  5. DSpace will support low-cost, hosted solutions and deployments (by featuring an easy, "just works" setup)

For details about about possible fundamental IR use cases, please see the "DSpace Use Cases / Features" section below.

OR13 Presentation on Vision Statement

An overview of the draft DSpace 3-5 Year Vision (as presented at the Open Repositories 2013 conference) is provided in the following "DSpace 2013 RoadMap & 3-5 Year Vision" screencast by Tim Donohue of DuraSpace.

 

The slides from the screencast and the OR13 talk are also available at: http://www.slideshare.net/tdonohue/dspace-roadmap-vision-2013-or13

DSpace Use Cases / Features (Very Rough Draft / Notes)

What follows is a (rough) listing of core use cases & features that DSpace should strive to meet, based on the "3-5 year vision statement" detailed above. 

These lists are by no means final, they are just an initial brainstorm of organizing use cases and features into three main categories: "Primary / Core Features", "Possible Extension/Plugins", "Likely Extensions/Plugins".   The goals are to generate discussion and attempt to determine which use cases/features are fundamental to all DSpace users and which could be provided by a (third party or centrally maintained) plugin/extension.

Recently, other repository systems have done some similar Use Case / Requirements lists. There may be some overlap in these use cases that could be helpful in our brainstorms / analysis.

Primary / Core Features

The following features seem to be primary use cases of DSpace. Therefore, these features should likely be immediately available in "out-of-the-box" DSpace and should require no extra installation/setup:

Possible Extensions / Plugins

The following features may or may not be available in "out-of-the-box" DSpace. It's arguable whether these are primary use cases that DSpace should support. It's possible some of these features could be handled by plugins which you install in DSpace, or by "hooks" into external services/tools.

Likely Extensions / Plugins

The following features seem to not be primary use cases/needs of DSpace. Therefore, these features would likely NOT be provided by "out-of-the-box" DSpace.  They would either need to be implemented as plugins to DSpace, or DSpace would integrate into external services/tools which provide these features.