This is the January 2018 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. We concluded the 2017 membership campaign by raising $567,250 from 76 members. The annual goal was $580,000, so we came within 97% of our target. Thanks to all our members - we couldn't support and sustain the project without you! 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!
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
The Candidate Recommendation of the Fedora API Specification is still 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
The public comment period for the Candidate Recommendation will remain open for approximately one more month, after which 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
German-Speaking Fedora User Group
A Fedora User Group Meeting was held in Hamburg, Germany, in December, where widespread interest was indicated to initialize a German-speaking Fedora User Group. This group will serve as a platform to discuss Fedora related topics (also related applications like Samvera/Hyrax, Islandora etc.), and for having one or two face-to-face meetings the year. If you are interested in joining and participating in this group, please respond to the message on the Fedora Community mailing list.
Oxford Common Filesystem
The inaugural discussion on the "Oxford Common Filesystem Layout" took place on Friday, Dec 1st. The notes, along with audio and video recordings, of the first Oxford Common Filesystem Layout call on December 1 are still available for review. This 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. The next meeting will be held on January 19 at 11am EST - an initial agenda and call-in information is available online. 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
IDCC18
The 13th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC18) will be held February 19-22, 2018. Fedora Product Manager David Wilcox will offer a workshop entitled Supporting FAIR Data Principles with Fedora on Monday, February 19. Workshop details and a draft agenda are available. Please register in advance to attend.
Previous Events
SWIB17
SWIB conference (Semantic Web in Libraries), which took place December 4-6 in Hamburg, Germany, is an annual conference focusing on Linked Open Data (LOD) in libraries and related organizations. The conference is single-track with a very practical focus; presentations covered topics such as schema.org, BIBFRAME, Bibliotek-o, and tools for generating, managing, and publishing linked data. This year's conference featured a well-attended Fedora workshop, the agenda and slides from which are available on the project wiki. A Fedora User Group Meeting was also held on December 7 following the conference - attended by 17 people, this meeting served as a catalyst for establishing a German-speakering Fedora User Group that will meet once or twice per year. Details on this group are included earlier in this newsletter.
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 took place on December 11-12 in Washington, DC. The program included a well-attended panel on Fedora and digital preservation that featured a lively discussion on our community's approach via standards and specifications. In particular, the discussion highlighted the many contributions of Fedora community members, from developer effort, to initiatives like the Oxford Common Filesystem Layout, to project governance.
