This is the December 2017 edition of the Fedora Newsletter. This newsletter summarizes the most significant activities within the Fedora community over the last month.
Call for Action
Fedora is designed, built, used, and supported by the community. An easy and important way that you can contribute to the effort is by helping resolve outstanding bugs. If you have an interest in gaining a better understanding of the Fedora code base, or a specific interest in any of these bugs, please add a comment to a ticket and we can work together to move your interest forward.
Membership
Fedora is funded entirely through the contributions of DuraSpace members that allocate their annual funding to Fedora. The 2017 membership campaign is drawing to a close, and so far the Fedora project has raised $567,250 from 76 members. The annual goal this year is $580,000, so we are over 97% of the way there. We will continue to coordinate with members of the Fedora Leadership Group to expand the pool of DuraSpace members supporting the Fedora project and build a sustainable funding base for the future. If your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us and help us reach our goal!
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
The Candidate Recommendation of the Fedora API Specification is now available for public review.
As described in the charter, this specification is designed to:
- Define the characteristics and expectations of how clients interact with Fedora implementations
- Define such interactions such that an implementation’s conformance is testable
- Enable interoperability by striving to minimize the need for modifications to client applications in order to work with different implementations of the Fedora API specification
The core HTTP and notification services defined in this specification are listed below, along with the associated standards from which they are derived:
- Resource Management (Linked Data Platform)
- Resource Versioning (Memento)
- Resource Authorization (Web Access Controls)
- Notifications (Activity Streams)
- Extended Binary Resource Operations
- Fixity (HTTP headers)
- Referenced Content via message/external-body Content-Type
This announcement for public comment on the Candidate Recommendation marks the beginning of a projected two-month period within which time we are targeting the release of the full Recommendation. Minimum requirements for transitioning to releasing the Recommendation include:
- Specification compliance test suite
- Two or more implementations of the specification
- No unresolved, outstanding critical issues, as defined by the specification editors
Please contact the Fedora Community or Fedora Specification Editors with any general comments. Any comments on details of the specification, itself, should be posted as GitHub issues.
Community-driven Activity
Oxford Common Filesystem
The inaugural discussion on the "Oxford Common Filesystem Layout" took place on Friday, Dec 1st. The notes are available online, along with audio and video recordings. The “Oxford Common Filesystem Layout” initiative is motivated by the need for a preservation-centric, common approach to filesystem (or cloud) layout for institutional repositories. The goal of this effort is to establish or identify recommendations for how IR systems should structure and store files. One of the objectives of the call was to highlight relevant prior art, driving use cases, and active initiatives, all of which are captured in the notes. The next meeting will be held on January 19 - please join the pasig-discuss mailing list for further updates.
Fedora 5.0.0
With Fedora's support for semantic versioning and the policy to limit the number of major releases to one per year, the primary change found in the next major release of Fedora (5.0.0) will be an alignment of the RESTful API with the Fedora API Specification. Two recent sprints made significant progress towards this goal, with the current focus being on exposing versioned resources per the Memento specification.
Conferences and events
In an attempt to simplify the task of keeping up with Fedora-related meetings and events, a Fedora calendar is available to the community as HTML and iCal .
Additionally, thanks to the community contribution of Michael B. Klein from Northwestern University, the fedora-project now has a self-registration form. Come join the conversation!
Upcoming Events
SWIB17
SWIB conference (Semantic Web in Libraries), which takes place December 4-6 in Hamburg, Germany, is an annual conference focusing on Linked Open Data (LOD) in libraries and related organizations. It is well established as an event where IT staff, developers, librarians, and researchers from all over the world meet and mingle and learn from each other. The topics of talks and workshops at SWIB revolve around opening data, linking data and creating tools and software for LOD production scenarios. This year's conference will feature a Fedora workshop, and a Fedora User Group Meeting will be held on December 7 following the conference. Please register in advance to attend - all are welcome.
CNI Fall Meeting
Representatives from CNI member organizations gather twice annually to explore new technologies, content, and applications; to further collaboration; to analyze technology policy issues; and to catalyze the development and deployment of new projects. This year's Fall meeting will take place on December 11-12 in Washington, DC. The program includes a panel on Fedora and digital preservation featuring a discussion on our community's approach via standards and specifications.
Previous Events
Samvera Connect
Samvera Connect provides a chance for Samvera Project participants to gather in one place at one time, with an emphasis on synchronizing efforts, technical development, plans, and community links. The meeting program is aimed at existing users, managers and developers and at new folks who may be just "kicking the tires" on Samvera and who want to know more. This year's conference featured a variety of workshops, presentations, panels, lightning talks, unconference sessions, and working/interest group meetings.
