Fedora: An Architecture for Complex
			Objects and their Relationships

			    Sandra Payette, Cornell

Abstract:
The Fedora Project has been devoted to the goal of providing open-source
digital repository software that can serve as the foundation for many types of
information management systems including institutional repositories, digital
libraries, multimedia authoring systems, archival repositories, and educational
software systems. This seminar will focus on the use of Fedora as a flexible,
general-purpose repository service for managing and accessing digital objects.
Other topics of discussion will include the use of Fedora in creating an
information network overlay upon distributed sources, and Fedora’s role in
facilitating digital preservation of complex objects.

At the core of Fedora is a powerful digital object model that supports multiple
representations or views of each digital object. These representations may
originate from data stored locally, from data referenced at other networked
locations, or from data produced dynamically by local or remote web services.
Relationships among digital objects can be stored and queried, providing the
foundation for expressing rich information networks. The Fedora repository
service supports a variety of management functions including content
versioning, ingest and export in standard XML formats, and fine-grained access
control. All functionality of Fedora is exposed as a set of web services with
well-documented REST and SOAP interfaces.

Bio:
Sandra Payette is a Researcher in the Computing and Information Science (CIS)
program at Cornell University. Her research areas include information network
overlays for scholarly communication, distributed architectures for digital
libraries, information modeling and metadata, digital preservation, and policy
enforcement for digital content. Sandra is responsible, with Carl Lagoze, for
the design and development of a digital repository architecture known as Fedora
funded by DARPA and NSF. She is co-leader of the open-source Fedora Project
(http://www.fedora/info), which is a collaborative endeavor with the University
of Virginia to produce open-source software based on the original Fedora model.
Funded by the Andrew W.  Mellon Foundation, this software is being adopted by a
variety of educational, library, research, and commercial organizations. With
funding from the NSF SEIII program, she is currently collaborating with
colleagues from Cornell and LANL on the Pathways project. Pathways will
demonstrate a graph-based information network overlay, including workflow and
service integration that can serve as a model for next-generation scholarly
communication systems.