2009-04-16 - Committer Meeting (Ithaca)

Roadmap Review

This discussion carried over from Wednesday. The list below includes items from a) Chris' original roadmap slides, b) Wednesday discussion, and c) Thursday morning discussion:

Lightweight Interfaces
- SWORD, ORE, WebDAV, AtomPub
Lowered Barrier to Entry
- Developers: Build and pluggability improvements
- Users: Install and config improvements
- Users: Improved object builders
- Users: Making RDF manipulation/viewing easier (e.g. browse to objects by relationship)
RDF/Semweb
- Mulgara: MPTStore Resolver
- Mulgara: XA2 Improvements
  - Multiple writers
  - Design offers better throughput for many small writes (each in transaction)
- RELS-INT
- Indexing other datastreams, with potential of multiple graphs.
- Allowing arbitrary RDF with choice of which model to put it in.
Storage Improvements
- Akubra (improved pluggability)
- Replication to DuraSpace
Content Modeling
- ActiveFedora (MediaShelf)
- Enhanced Content Models (Asger)
Performance
- Contributions from FIZ (Kai)
- Sun Performance Testing w/The Grinder (Dan)
Security
- FESL (Eddie, MediaShelf, UPEI, others)
Ingest and Workflow
- Queue Service for supporting workflow (Dan/Rick)
- Possible replacement for DirIngest using above service (Dan/Rick)
- Ingest files, automatically have them wrapped in Fedora objects
- FCREPO-454 (Use of "workflow state" attribute?)
- Survey to community re: Workflow use/needs (Carol)

Module/Plugin Architecture

We discussed and agreed to move toward using Spring Dynamic Modules (OSGi) for Fedora's future module plugin framework. Here are the notes from the board:

Review of New Website

Rick and Carissa gave us an overview of the latest FC website design. The group agreed that we'd like the content area on the front page to be less text-heavy and to have a general layout like this:

[short blurb on what Fedora is, sans big words]

[img1] [img2] [img3] [img4]

..where img1..4 are icons pointing to the main areas of interest for visitors to our site.

WebDAV

Eddie reported that Hull (Chris Awre) and King's College are currently considering WebDAV and/or JSR170 type interfaces to Fedora.

ChrisW reported that he has been working on a fairly simple WebDAV library for DuraSpace (sans versioning, extensible properties, etc), with an eye toward possible use of it in Fedora in the future, to facilitate a "simple file ingest". Depending on what Hull and King's College are planning for their project, this may represent a useful starting point. If they're after more advanced features such as versioning, extensible properties, etc, it may be best to start with something like Jackrabbit's jcr-webdav impl.

Fedora 3.2 Planning

We are still planning on releasing on May 5th. Code freeze is April 28th.

We reviewed the latest outstanding tracker items for 3.2 and set "Blocker" status for all those we felt should hold up the release if not ready.