Five fantastic Fedora Commons projectsin five minutes, in no particular order

Carol Minton MorrisCommunications DirectorNational Science Digital Library, Fedora CommonsCornell University

Fedora:

FlexibleExtensibleDigitalObjectRepositoryArchitecture,

or as Mark Leggott, University of Prince Edward Island, University

Librarian describes it . . . .

1. Which begs the question: Can Fedora really run a University?

Fedora, enables the creation of durable, reusable and independent resources for a new kind of scholarwho does not yet know how they will be used to create warranted knowledge in the future.

Fedora Commons, home of Fedora software, is at the intersection of key social and technical trends:

Open Scholarly Contexts Technical Contexts

scholarly publication service-oriented

e-scholarship web 2.0

collaborative digital library semantic web

e-science web 3.0

museums

The Fedora Commons community consists of:

ConsortiaCorporationsGovernment AgenciesMedical CentersNational Libraries and ArchivesProfessional SocietiesPublishersResearch Groups and ProjectsSemantic and Virtual Library ProjectsUniversity IT DepartmentsUniversity Libraries and Archives

NSDL is also at theintersection of social and technical trends.

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) uses Fedora to create a semantic educational layer on top of over 2.5 M repository objects in support of new forms of e-scholarship.

Connections between content items are captured and stored in Fedora as semantic relationships describing both the linkage and its meaning.

2. What if you could provide a set of high quality, vetted resources aligned to standards so that teachers could

create their own on-the-fly classroom eZines?

3. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could mix and match scholarly repository resources with other stuff from the web?

4. Can popular culture assets be made available for scholarly research while managing intellectual property rights?

5. Wouldn’t it be great to use freely available technology like Google Maps to mash-up repository holdings with geographic location information to add additional semantic meaning to resources?

While Rob Chavez was at Tufts University, where Fedora is used tomanage digital collections, he experimented with using Fedora datastreams to disseminate repository content in a way that Google Earth could use:

Fedora allows repository managers to model and manage data in such a way that familiar tools —Google Earth—can access and provide context for loads of Fedora managed data.

The content itself can aggregate even more Fedora managed content.

Next steps: to use the same tools to aggregate this data temporarily—time and space browser of Fedora data—to manipulate the data and push it back to Fedora.

Questions?

Open Repositories 2008, Call for Papers--Dec. 7, 2007http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Carol Minton Morris, Communications and Media Directorcmmorris@ fedora-commons.org (607) 255-2702