Fedora (software)
Encyclopedia
Fedora is a modular architecture built on the principle that interoperability
Interoperability
Interoperability is a property referring to the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together . The term is often used in a technical systems engineering sense, or alternatively in a broad sense, taking into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system to...

 and extensibility
Extensibility
In software engineering, extensibility is a system design principle where the implementation takes into consideration future growth. It is a systemic measure of the ability to extend a system and the level of effort required to implement the extension...

 is best achieved by the integration of data, interface
Interface (computer science)
In the field of computer science, an interface is a tool and concept that refers to a point of interaction between components, and is applicable at the level of both hardware and software...

s, and mechanisms (i.e., executable programs) as clearly defined module
Modularity (programming)
Modular programming is a software design technique that increases the extent to which software is composed of separate, interchangeable components called modules by breaking down program functions into modules, each of which accomplishes one function and contains everything necessary to accomplish...

s. Fedora is a digital asset management
Digital asset management
Digital asset management consists of management tasks and decisions surrounding the ingestion, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets...

 (DAM) architecture, upon which many types of digital library
Digital library
A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks...

, institutional repositories, digital archives, and digital libraries systems might be built. Fedora is the underlying architecture for a digital repository, and is not a complete management, indexing, discovery, and delivery application.

The Fedora software is available under the terms of the Apache License
Apache License
The Apache License is a copyfree free software license authored by the Apache Software Foundation . The Apache License requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer....

.

History

Fedora was developed jointly by Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 Information Science
Information science
-Introduction:Information science is an interdisciplinary science primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information...

 and the University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...

 Library. Fedora began as a DARPA and NSF
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

-funded research project of Carl Lagoze and Sandy Payette at Cornell University's Digital Library Research Group in 1997, where the first reference implementation and a CORBA
Çorba
Chorba , ciorbă , shurpa , shorpo , or sorpa is one of various kinds of soup or stew found in national cuisines across Middle East...

-based technical implementation were built. Since then, several modifications have been made to the architecture, and in late 2005, version 2.1 was released. The current version is 3.4.

The Fedora Project is currently supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City and Princeton, New Jersey in the United States, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, endowed with wealth accumulated by the late Andrew W. Mellon of the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the product of the 1969...

 and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation seeks to develop outcome-based projects that will improve the quality of life for future generations. The private foundation focuses upon portfolios of large-scale initiatives and encourages collaboration so as to achieve the most significant and enduring outcomes...

, and is directed by Sandy Payette from Cornell and Thornton Staples from the University of Virginia.

Trademark dispute

When the Fedora Core
Fedora (operating system)
Fedora is a RPM-based, general purpose collection of software, including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat...

 distribution was created by Red Hat
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....

, and the name adopted, Red Hat attempted to assert its trademark against the Cornell software. Cornell University and the University of Virginia considered legal action against Red Hat.

Further discussion of this dispute seems to be either unspoken or under wraps; both projects continue to use the name and there seems to be no further press since November 2003.

Features

Fedora provides a general-purpose management layer for digital objects. Object management is based on content models that represent data objects (units of content) or collections of data objects. The objects contain linkages between datastreams (internally managed or external content files), metadata
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

 (inline or external), system metadata (including a PID – persistent identifier – that is unique to the repository
Software repository
A software repository is a storage location from which software packages may be retrieved and installed on a computer.- Discussion :Many software publishers and other organizations maintain servers on the Internet for this purpose, either free of charge or for a subscription fee...

), and behaviors that are themselves code objects that provide bindings or links to disseminators (software processes that can be used with the datastreams). Content models can be thought of as containers that give a useful shape to information poured into them; if the information fits the container, it can immediately be used in predefined ways.

Fedora supports two types of access services: a management client for ingest, maintenance
Software maintenance
Software Maintenance in software engineering is the modification of a software product after delivery to correct faults, to improve performance or other attributes....

, and export of objects; or via API hooks for customized web-based access services built on either HTTP or SOAP
SOAP
SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...

. A Fedora Repository provides a general-purpose management layer for digital objects, and containers that aggregate mime-typed datastreams (e.g., digital image
Digital image
A digital image is a numeric representation of a two-dimensional image. Depending on whether or not the image resolution is fixed, it may be of vector or raster type...

s, XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 files, metadata). Out-of-the-box Fedora includes the necessary software tools to ingest, manage, and provide basic delivery of objects with few or no custom disseminators, or can be used as a backend to a more monolithic user interface.

Fedora supports ingest and export of digital objects in a variety of XML formats. This enables interchange between Fedora and other XML-based applications and facilitates archiving tasks.

Digital Object Model

The FEDORA digital object model allows tight management of metadata and digital content, regardless of format. The system is scalable and flexible allowing for FEDORA to associate objects with external or distributed repositories. Objects and behaviour are separated making it possible to change the required behaviours by altering the mechanisms without changing the objects themselves.

Architecture

FEDORA server architecture is based upon four main Application Programming Interfaces (APIs): manage, access, search and the Open Archival Initiative service (for metadata harvesting).

External links


Fedora Systems


Frontends

  • Fez
  • Islandora : a Drupal module that users can implement to view and manage digital objects stored in Fedora.
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