DuraSpace: Digital Information All Ways, Always Pretoria, South Africa May 14 th, 2009

DuraSpace, Inc. 501-(c)3 private, non-profit company 4-year project funded by Moore Foundation to become self-sustaining Continuing software development Moving towards community-based software development Establishing “solution communities” for the development of solution bundles.

DuraSpace Product Fedora Dspace DuraClould Akubra – storage plug-in module with tranactional file system Mulgara – RDF indexing engine Topaz – core semantic knowledgebase components

Solution Communities Community group that creates and maintains the vision for solution bundle in an area Gathers resources to create software for solution Coordinates development with DuraSpace technical staff Smaller group that gets things done will emerge

Solution Areas Data Curation Open Access Publishing Integration Services Preservation and Archiving Small Archives Scholars’ Workbench

Other Possible Community Groups Other software development groups News and Publications Outreach group that works with our Communications Director Issue/advocacy groups that work on standards important to the community

The Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture A set of abstractions that can be used to represent different kinds of data A repository management system A foundation for many information management applications Designed to make data “durable” over the long term

154 Current Known Users Broadcasting and media – 1 Consortia – 7 Corporations – 14 Government agencies – 4 IT- Related Institutions – 9 Medical Centers and Libraries – 4 Museums and Cultural Organizations – 5 National Libraries and Archives – 16 Professional Societies – 2 Publishing - 4 Research Groups and Projects – 17 Semantic and Virtual Library Projects - 6 University Libraries and Archives - 66

The Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture A set of abstractions that can be used to represent different kinds of data A repository management system A foundation for many information management applications Designed to make data “durable” over the long term The key to using Fedora is in the data modeling

Making complex digital information “durable” is a very hard problem The existence and meaning of content needs to be verifiable as technologies change A history of the changes to the encoding and state of content must be reliably provided A meaningful context for any unit of content may be one of many and must be sustained Complex resources will increasingly be dispersed across institutional boundaries.

The Fedora abstractions provide a durability framework. Content is “unitized” as information objects that combine data, metadata, policies, relationships and the history of the object. Complex digital resources are formally defined graphs of related objects. The public view of the content is presented as abstract behaviors. The web services orientation of Fedora provides the basis for repository federation.

DC Persistent ID RELS-EXT AUDIT n n Reserved Datastreams Custom Datastreams (any type, any number) A data object is one unit of content POLICY

Relationships Among Objects Describes adjacency relationships among objects RDF data of the form: PID – typeOfRelationship – relatedObjectPID Can used to assemble aggregations of objects Can build graphs of relationships to feed into user interfaces

Objects Representing Aggregations Creating parent objects for complex resources Representing explicit collections Representing implicit collections Creating digital surrogates for physical entities

Optional Object Behaviors Data objects can have different views or transformations Sets of abstract behaviors that different kinds of objects can subscribe to Corresponding sets of services that specific objects can execute The business logic is hidden behind an abstraction

Content Access Content Management

Content Models Create classes of data objects Expressed as Cmodel objects A Cmodel object defines the number and types of data streams for objects of that class A Cmodel object binds to service objects to enable appropriate behaviors to be inherited by data objects

Fedora Repository Service GSearch OAI Ingest Simple JMS Simple JMS Fedora Framework Service Integration More… repository publishes events services listen and consume events or other messages

Current Work… early seeds for DuraCloud concept Shared Storage Abstraction Plug-in 1Plug-in 2Plug-in … Amazon University SAN/Fabric Local Storage

DuraCloud: Possible Evolution… Shared Storage Abstraction Plug-in 1Plug-in 2Plug-in … Microsoft IntraCloud or local store Internet Archive DuraCloud Instance Chinese Menu of DuraCloud Services -Group A: replicate, monitor, audit, migrate -Group B: aggregate, relate, link Amazon University IT Google