Web Services and Fedora EDUCAUSE Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference January 14, 2003 Tim Sigmon University of Virginia

What Are Web Services? WWW mainly used for human interaction –HTML forms and HTTP transport Web Services are meant to support machine-to-machine or application-to- application interaction

Web Services Definition A Web Service is a unit of application logic providing data and services to other applications. Applications access Web Services via ubiquitous Web protocols and data formats such as HTTP, XML, and SOAP, with no need to worry about how each Web Service is implemented. -Microsoft

Another Definition A Web Service is a software component that is platform and implementation independent and that can be: Described using a service description language Published to a registry of services Discovered through a standard mechanism Invoked through a declared API Composed with other services - Building Web Services with Java

Web Services Technologies XML is the common language –platform independent –easy to parse –human readable (sort of!) –extensible via namespaces and schemas SOAP for transport of information WSDL for description of services UDDI for discovery

SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol XML-based messaging framework Transport is usually HTTP, but can be any transport

WSDL Web Services Definition Language XML language for defining Web Services endpoints, access protocol, service interface, and implementation details Web Services equivalent of an IDL Enables automatic generation of language specific API for accessing a particular Web Service

UDDI Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration Discovery protocol for Web Services through which applications and/or Web Services can find other Web Services Publish, find, and bind information about how to use Web Services Public registries exist but UDDI can also be used internally UDDI has been slow to catch on

Additional Web Services Technologies WS Choreography –a language to compose and describe the relationships between Web services (e.g., sequencing, state management, etc.) –ability to combine simple services to produce complex results WS Security –many areas and standards WS Transactions

Web Services Characteristics Evolutionary, not revolutionary Builds on existing web technologies and infrastructure Still evolving rapidly – numerous standards initiatives with more appearing almost monthly (W3C, OASIS, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, …) Tools maturing (Apache, IBM, BEA, Sun, Microsoft, many others) Lots of testing the water Some highly visible Internet applications (Amazon, Google) Enterprise implementations are emerging Tons of hype, including significant over-hype

Some Early Adopters Google and Amazon – – US Military – logistics applications between branches of the service (e.g., provisioning cargo planes) According to Forrester, 52% of US companies > $1B have rolled out or are rolling out a Web Services project

This Fedora Project is not the Redhat Fedora project. Fedora

The Fedora Project Fedora Digital Object Repository System –Extensible digital object model –Repository System exposed via Web Service APIs –Scalable, persistent storage for content and metadata –Local and remote content –Associate services with objects –Content versioning Fedora Use cases –Content Management (CMS) –Digital Library architecture –Digital Asset Management –Institutional Repository –Scholarly publishing –Preservation Open source software

Fedora History Research (1997-present) : –DARPA and NSF-funded research project at Cornell (Carl Lagoze and Sandy Payette) –Reference implementation developed at Cornell First Application ( ) : –University of Virginia digital library prototype (Thornton Staples and Ross Wayland) –Scale/stress testing for 10,000,000 objects Open Source Software (2002-present): –Andrew W. Mellon Foundation granted Virginia and Cornell $1 million to develop a production-quality Fedora system –Fedora 1.0 released in May 2003 –

Persistent ID (PID) Disseminators SystemMetadata Datastreams Globally unique persistent id Public view: access methods for obtaining “disseminations” of digital object content Internal view: metadata necessary to manage the object Protected view: content that makes up the “basis” of the object Digital Object Model Architectural View

Persistent ID (PID) Default Disseminators Simple Image SystemMetadata Datastreams Digital Object Model Example Disseminators Get Profile List Items Get Item List Methods Get DC Record Get Thumbnail Get Medium Get High Get VeryHigh

Fedora and Web Services Fedora Repository is a set of Web Services –Access/Search (API-A) and Management (API-M) –Service descriptions published using WSDL –Both SOAP and REST bindings Back-end services –Digital object behaviors implemented as linkages to other distributed web services –Service binding metadata (WSDL) stored in special Fedora Behavior Mechanism objects. –Fedora acts as mediator to these services.

Fedora Repository System Client and Web Service Interactions Fedora Repository System Content Transform Service Content Transform Service user Web Service Dispatch Web Service Service BackendFrontend client application client application web browser user

Fedora Repository Service Interfaces Management Service (API-M) –Ingest - XML-encoded object submission –Create - interactive object creation via API requests –Maintain - interactive object modification via API requests –Validate – application of integrity rules to objects –Identify - generate unique object identifiers –Security - authentication and access control –Preserve - automatic content versioning and audit trail –Export - XML-encoded object formats Access Service (API-A and API-A-LITE) –Search - search repository for objects –Object Reflection - what disseminations can the object provide? –Object Dissemination - request a view of the object’s content OAI-PMH Provider Service –OAI-DC records

Fedora Repository System

Fedora 1.2 Software Feature Set Open Fedora APIs –Repository as web services (REST and SOAP bindings); WSDL interface defs Flexible Digital Object Model –Content View: objects as bundle of items (content and metadata) –Service View: objects as a set of service methods (“behaviors”) –Extensible functionality by associating services with objects Repository System –Core Services: Management, Access/Search, OAI-PMH –Storage: XML object store; relational db object cache; relational db object registry –Mediation - auto-dispatching to distributed web services for content transformation –Auto-Indexing – system metadata and DC record of each object –HTTP Basic Authentication and Access Control –Built-in disseminator services: XSLT x-form, image manipulation, xml-to-PDF Content Versioning –Automatic version control (saves version of content/metadata when modified) –Enables date-time stamped API requests (see object as it looked at a point in time) Clients –Fedora Administrator: GUI client to create/maintain objects –Default Web browser interface: search; access objects via default disseminator –Command line utilities (batch load, ingest, purge, others) –Migration Utility – mass export/ingest

Fedora Software Distribution Package Open Source (Mozilla Public License) 100% Java (Sun Java J2SDK1.4) Supporting Technologies –Apache Tomcat 4.1 and Apache Axis (SOAP) –Xerces for XML parsing and validation –Saxon 6.5 for XSLT transformation –Schematron 1.5 for validation –MySQL and Mckoi relational database –Oracle 9i support Deployment Platforms –Windows 2000, NT, XP –Solaris –Linux

Future Software Releases Fedora Object XML (FOXML) –Internal storage format; direct expression of Fedora object model –Better support for relationships (“kinship” metadata) –Better support for audit trail (event history) –Format identifiers for dynamic service binding Shibboleth authentication Policy Enforcement –XACML expression language –Fedora policy enforcement module Web interface for easy content submission Batch object modification utility Administrative Reporting Object Event History (ABC/RDF disseminations) Better support for “collections” New ingest and export formats (METS1.3, DIDL) December 2003 – December 2004

Questions?

DEMO: Basic Use Cases Image (multiple datastreams) Image (Mr. SID) EAD (Rita Mae Brown papers) Text conversion (TEI to PDF) Basic Search