Learning Outcomes

• What can Fedora do for you
• The purpose of a repository
• Understanding the key capabilities of the software

Introduction to Fedora 4

• What is a repository?
• Guiding principles
• History
• How Fedora exposes and connects content within and across institutions

Fedora 4.0 Features

• Back-end preservation/management vs. exposing content to the web/users
  1. Durable storage
  2. Linked data, REST API
     1. RDF response format, what kind of capabilities this enables
  3. User facing features
  4. Content modelling as a bridge between front and back end
• Core vs. external capabilities

Administrative Console

Tour of the HTML administrative interface.

Authorization

Pluggable authorization framework.

Basic Authorization

Role-based authentication.

XACML Authorization

XACML enforcement implementation.

Durable Storage

Features relating to preservation and long-term access.

Fixity

Generating and comparing checksums.

Backup and Restore

Full repository backup and restoration.

Export and Import

Export a node or a section of the node hierarchy.

Import an exported node or node hierarchy.

Option to export in JCR/XML for transparency.

Policy-Driven Storage

Policies can route different types of files to different back-end storage locations on ingest.

Versioning

Versions can be created across the entire repository or on particular API calls.

Content Modelling

Content can be modelled using Compact Node Definitions (CNDs).

A CND can define a number of properties and be assigned to objects as a mixin.

Any number of mixins can be assigned to an object; they are cumulative.

Linked Data

Compliance with LDP 1.0 spec.

Node properties are RDF triples.

Metadata can be represented as RDF triples.

Many possibilities for exposing, importing, sharing resources with other web applications.

Search

Fedora 4 includes an internal administrative search and the option to plug in external search applications.

Internal Search

Simple property search and limited SPARQL endpoint.

External Search

Repository events generate JMS messages, which can be consumed by a JMS message consumer and relayed to an external search index (e.g. Solr).

Triplestore

Similar to external search, an external triplestore can be plugged into Fedora 4. The same JMS message consumer relays repository events to the triplestore index (e.g. Fuseki, Sesame).

Transactions

Multiple actions can be bundled together into a single repository event (transaction).

Transactions offer performance benefits by cutting down on the number of times data is written to the repository filesystem (which tends to be the slowest action).

Clustering