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The institutions and communities served by the Fedora Commons software products are diverse, but they have in common investments in transparency, data mobility, and durability. These common investments often appear in the form of common integration patterns involving Fedora Commons and other software. Rather than elaborate a boutique API bound to a particular implementation of Fedora, we feel these community interests would be better served by creating independent, conformance-testable API modules offered as extensions to an API supported more widely than the Fedora community.
From its inceptionIn the 10 years since the 2.0 design work (and arguably earlier), the Fedora Commons project has been an attempt attempted to overlay linked data descriptions on stored or linked binary assets. Fedora Commons has never been the sole product in this space, and this more general case has evolved into the Linked Data Platform Specification, a W3C standard that describes much of what Fedora Commons provides at the API level. Given the broad audience and support for this specification, the Fedora developers have chosen to make it the basis for a Fedora Repository REST API, of which the Fedora Commons software will be a reference implementation. Building around an independent API based in broader standards will allow the community more security and flexibility: The ecosystem of software around the repository will be able to use more sources of data, back-end migration may be possible with less disruption to running applications, and the chance of third-party tools being available for an institution's data will be greater.
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