Due to the evolution of usage patterns for PCDM (particularly as they relate to Fedora), the structure of resources described in this guide is not necessarily the recommended structure.
However, the details and examples of how to use LDP Direct and Indirect Containers are still very informative in understanding how those constructs work.

-- Andrew Woods 2015-10-30

Fedora4 (F4) implements the Linked Data Platform (LDP) W3C Recommendation. Additionally, the Portland Common Data Model (PCDM) has increasingly become adopted as a common content modeling approach in Fedora4.

LDP defines terminology and interaction models relating to linked data resources and servers. The "action" in inter"action" models should be emphasized, because LDP introduces two new concepts that enhance the actions within a linked data server, F4 in this case. These concepts are:

These two container types have associated behavior that are highlighted and clarified here, in this guide. Two different uses of DirectContainers are illustrated in the Book and Ordering examples, respectively, and the use of IndirectContainers is described in the Collections example.

This guide is designed to describe the details of both LDP and PCDM in the context of F4 by walking through a simple example of a single collection, consisting of a single book that implements page ordering.

Note0: Although the following example uses specifically named resources, such as "poe" and "raven", production scenarios will likely use opaque identifiers/URLs by allowing them to be auto-generated by F4.
Note1: An easy way to stand-up an environment for executing the following REST requests is to use fcrepo4-vagrant
Note1a: F4 is deployed in the fcrepo4-vagrant box with the context "fcrepo". If you are deploying in another environment, you may need to change the "curl" requests and turtle files (*.ttl) below to reflect a different context.
Note2: Please use your Internet browser to inspect the results of each of the steps below! http://localhost:8080/fcrepo/rest

The full slide deck of images are available for download.

End Goal - Final State

This diagram depicts the logical structure of resources and relationships of a collection ("poe") that consists of a book ("raven") that consists of three pages that are ordered.

This is a diagram of the same collection, book, and pages, but depicting the directory structure and LDP resource types.

The following steps will walk through the process of creating this structure from the ground up.
The different types of LDP containers and sources will be detailed, as well as the PCDM types and relationships in the steps below.