A group of stakeholders from the Fedora community have
come together to begin the process of planning a three
year software development project that will direct new
resources toward a major Fedora overhaul, adding
capabilities that will make Fedora the repository platform
of choice for the future. The group anticipates that
improvements will include features such as greater
scalability, data management support, storage flexibility,
and others the community has been requesting. This new
initiative is being called Fedora Futures.
The Coalition of Networked Information 2012 Fall
Meeting held in Washington D.C. Dec. 10-11 was the setting
for a session that introduced the Fedora Futures community
initiative. Members of Fedora Futures announced the
project and led a discussion on the future of the Fedora
Repository that included a review of the current state of
Fedora, the proponents and objectives of the Futures
initiative, and a review on the use cases, stakeholders,
high level requirements and processes which are guiding
the project. The group is now seeking broader community
input and will be reaching out to current DuraSpace
sponsors and others in the near future. The discussion
was standing room only, with 75 interested attendees
packed into the venue. The presentation is available on
the Fedora Futures wiki:
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Fedora+Futures+Home.
The discussion at CNI revolved around one central
question, posed by Mark Leggott, University Librarian at
Prince Edward Island and chair of the Fedora Futures
Steering Group: “Given the success and value of Fedora as
an open source, digital repository over the last 12 years,
how can the community marshal an effort to enhance the
platform in order to meet the known and emerging needs and
opportunities in the repository arena?”
“Fedora has a worldwide community of adopters, and has
proven itself as flexible, extensible and durable
architecture,” said Tom Cramer, Chief Technology
Strategist at Stanford University. He added, “for the
Futures project, our objectives are to preserve these
strengths, while increasing its performance, scalability
and modularity, and reducing its complexity at the same
time.” Another primary objective is to expand the pool of
developers actively committing to the project.
Matthias Razum, head of EScience from FIZ Karlsruhe,
presented the use cases and stakeholder profiles that are
guiding the new wave of development. These include
managing research and heterogeneous data more efficiently;
improving administrability of the repository, and
interacting with the linked data and the semantic web. Per
Razum, “Our targeted actors are not just administrators
and developers, but also curators and researchers; the
repository of the future has to serve needs across the
whole information lifecycle.”
Eddie Shin of MediaShelf LLC and a longtime Fedora
committer, was introduced as the project’s interim Product
Manager. Shin reviewed the technical and development
approach that the project group is undertaking. “We plan
to provide next generation repository while ensuring a
smooth upgrade path for existing institutions. We’ll do
this through a lean development methodology, with rapid
development and continuous release of functionality
produced in short iterations.”
The Fedora Futures initiative is being seeded by a
coalition of institutions that are all keenly interested
in seeing Fedora adapt to meet today’s and tomorrow’s
needs for a robust repository platform. Working
hand-in-glove with DuraSpace, the founding members of the
initiative are Columbia University, FIZ Karlsruhe,
MediaShelf LLC, Oxford University, the Smithsonian
Institute, Stanford University, University of Prince
Edward Island, and the University of Virginia. Each of
these institutions has committed to contributing
significant financial and/or personnel to the
redevelopment effort.
Jonathan Markow, Chief Strategy Officer at DuraSpace,
extended an invitation to the entire Fedora community to
participate in the effort. “The Futures group has
catalyzed renewed development for Fedora, but for the
effort to achieve its full potential for all stakeholders,
we need to enlist not only Fedora’s current committers,
but also all adopters, sponsors and service providers.”
A
prospectus is available to those who would like to get
involved as contributors to this effort by contacting
Jonathan Markow <[log in to unmask]>.
University of Virginia, Discovery Garden and University
of Prince Edward Island, Stanford University, Columbia
University, Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, FIZ
Karlsruhe, and MediaShelf have already pledged substantial
resources to the project.
Questions about the technical direction of the project
or offers of development support can be made to Edwin Shin
<
[log in to unmask]>
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