ArchReviewReport

DSpace+2.0 Architecture Review Report

On 24 January 2007, during the Open Repositories 2007 conference in San Antonio, TX, the DSpace Architecture Review Group released a report of the group's discussions and recommendations for the future of the DSpace architecture.

Download as PDF or in Word format.

Presentation: John Mark Ockerbloom gave a presentation at the conference summarizing the review and the report. Here are the slides in PDF and
in Powerpoint.

The presentation was also
liveblogged by Dorothea Salo.

An updated presentation at CNI Spring Forum 2007 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Missing File:  DSpace-arch-cni.ppt

Background: For details about the DSpace architecture review, members, meeting notes, and mailing list info, see this page.

Report Overview

Highlights of the DSpace architecture review group's recommendations for DSpace+2.0:

Components: Breaking DSpace up into a series of components would allow easier development on each component, and also enable different DSpace installations to have different features. For example, a DSpace installation might focus on EDT, on research datasets, or as a general institutional repository.

Various development projects are moving the system towards this end. Manakin allows UI components - such as Rochester's researcher pages - to be plugged into the main DSpace system much more easily than is currently possible. Another example is the event mechanism, which enables DSpace components to communicate by sending messages instead of having intertwined code. The related add-on mechanism aims to enable some separation of components. We can also leverage some investigative work into third-party (open source) tools and frameworks to help with this.

Upshot: The next DSpace release (1.5; sometime in mid-2007, we hope) will take big steps in this direction.

Information Model Updates: We will work to update the DSpace information model to allow more flexible metadata support and to more closely match FRBR. This is in the planning stages. Resources need to be found (by the forthcoming DSpace consortium) to undertake the considerable development involved.

Upshot: Still on the horizon

Workflow System: We will work to improve the DSpace workflow system to be more configurable, and applicable to other aspects of DSpace beside submission. This is still in the investigative phase, much like the workflow updates.

A number of other features are being implemented for DSpace+2.0. Recent developer posts have addressed low-level organization and management of the code, which only affects developers working on the DSpace system, not DSpace users.