http://fedora-commons.org/go/akubra

Akubra is a Java API that provides read/write access to URI-addressable files.  It is currently used by the Fedora Commons Repository software to provide an adaptable, file-oriented low level storage layer, but it is not Fedora-specific. Akubra achieves a high level of interoperability between storage systems by making simplifying assumptions:

In Akubra:
• a Blob is a finite-length bitstream with an id (a URI)
• a BlobStore is primarily concerned with providing read/write access to blobs.

This release has no core API changes, but several important improvements:
• The core Akubra jars are now available in Maven Central; using Akubra in a maven project no longer requires special repository configuration.
• All jars are now compiled for Java 6 (Java 5 has reached its End of Service Life)
• All jars now include OSGi metadata
• Logging is now done via SLF4J (was commons-logging)
• The JTA dependency is now to version 1.1 (was previously 1.0.1B)

Akubra is an open source project (licensed under Apache 2) and depends on community feedback and participation.  If you have any questions/comments about Akubra or are working on a custom implementation, we’d love to hear from you.  Please join one of the project mailing lists:

General questions, release announcements, etc:
http://groups.google.com/group/akubra-users

Discussion about the development of the Akubra API and implementations:
http://groups.google.com/group/akubra-dev

About Mulgara

Mulgara is a scalable RDF database written in Java that can help solve organizational information overload by making sure that data can be found, accessed, shared and reused.

Typical metadata about a word-processed document or an electronic mail message might include the author, the recipients, the subject, keywords, concepts addressed, people named, dates or places mentioned. Mulgara stores all of this metadata and creates relationships between it.

For a full list of Mulgara 2.1.7 updates, please see the release notes and documentation.

Release notes: http://mulgara.org/release.html#v2.1.7
Documentation: http://mulgara.org/trac/wiki/Docs

Please let us know if something breaks. You can get in touch with us on the mailing lists, or submit a report to the bug tracker: http://mulgara.org/trac/report.

The newly re-designed and reorganized January-February issue of D-Lib (http://www.dlib.org/) invites readers to be a part of an ongoing “timely and efficient information exchange for the digital library community to help digital libraries be a broad interdisciplinary field, and not a set of specialties that know little of each other.”

The design is concise and clean and now features direct links to abstracts or articles from the homepage along with the “Featured Digital Collection” and “News & Events” listings that D-Lib readers are familiar with.

D-Lib is funded by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI, http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/). The D-Lib Alliance (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/alliance-participants.html) of organizations that support D-Lib Magazine came together in 2007 in support of the of the magazine which continues to provide access to core historical literature on the development of digital libraries over the last 15 years through its archive (http://www.dlib.org/back.html). The publication has a global audience, and is mirrored at UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, England, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, State Library of Lower Saxony and the University Library of Goettingen, Goettingen, Germany, Universidad de Belgrano, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, and  BN - National Library of Portugal, Portugal.

The Open Repositories Conference aims to bring together individuals and organizations responsible for the conception, development, implementation, and management of digital repositories, as well as stakeholders who interact with them for achieving the widest possible integration in theoretical, practical, and strategic matters.

The program of papers, panel discussions, poster presentations, user groups, workshops, and tutorials will reflect the whole community of Open Repositories. Dedicated open source software community meetings for the major platforms (EPrints, DSpace and Fedora) will provide opportunities to advance and coordinate the development of repository installations across the world.

General information on the conference may be found here: http://or2010.fecyt.es/

You will find the full Call for Papers and the entry point to the submission
process at: http://or2010.fecyt.es/Publico/Call/

Proposals may be submitted until March 1, 2010. The first submissions are already coming in. OR10 organizers are are looking forward to yours!

For your convenience, this meeting is being held immediately before the JISC Dev8D repositories event.

The event will bring together software developers, repository managers, service providers, funding and advisory bodies to discuss the potential policy and technical issues associated with cloud computing and the delivery of repository services in UK HEIs.

Sandy Payette and Brad McLean from DuraSpace will be speaking along with Les Carr from EPrints, Alex Wade from Microsoft, Paul Miller from Cloud of Data and Terry Harmer from the Belfast eScience Centre.

More information at http://www.eduserv.org.uk/events/repcloud
Registration at http://repcloud.eventbrite.com/?ref=ebtn

A general understanding of utility computing solutions in the public cloud (as those terms are defined on the Wikipedia cloud computing entry), and particularly file storages olutions, will be helpful.

You will leave with a good understanding of:

• the technical options for integrating EPrints, DuraSpace and Microsoft Zentity with cloud services;
• the potential policy issues that arise from such usage;

and having had the chance to contribute your ideas and suggestions for future activities in this space.

The day will offer a mix of plenary talks (morning) and themed breakout sessions (afternoon) and is designed to appeal to both geeks and policy bods.

The deadlines are the following:

Papers/Abstracts Submissions and Invited Sessions Proposals: January 12th, 2010
Authors Notifications: February 12th, 2010
Camera-ready, full papers: March 3rd, 2010

Submissions for Face-to-Face or for Virtual Participation are both accepted. Both kinds of submissions will have the same reviewing process and the accepted papers will be included in the same proceedings.

Pre-Conference and Post-conference Virtual sessions (via electronic forums) will be held for each session included in the conference program, so that sessions papers can be read before the conference, and authors presenting at the same session can interact during one week before and after the conference. Authors can also participate in peer-to-peer reviewing in virtual sessions.

All Submitted papers/abstracts will go through three reviewing processes: (1) double-blind (at least three reviewers), (2) non-blind, and (3) participative peer reviews. These three kinds of review will support the selection process of those papers/abstracts that will be accepted for their presentation at the conference, as well as those to be selected for their publication in JSCI Journal.

Authors of accepted papers who registered in the conference can have access to the evaluations and possible feedback provided by the reviewers who recommended the acceptance of their papers/abstracts, so they can accordingly improve the final version of their papers. Non-registered authors will not have access to the reviews of their respective submissions.

Registration fees of an effective invited session organizer will be waived according to the policy described in the web page  (click on ‘Invited Session’, then on ‘Benefits for the Organizers of Invited Sessions’), where you can get information about the ten benefits for an invited session organizer. For Invited Sessions Proposals, please visit the conference web site, or directly to http://www.2010iiisconferences.org/iceme/organizer.asp

Authors of the best 10%-20% of the papers presented at the conference (included those virtually presented) will be invited to adapt their papers for their publication in the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics.

Madrid, Spain Repositories have been successfully established — within and across institutions — as a major source of digital information in a variety of environments such as research, education and cultural heritage. In a world of increasingly dispersed and modularized digital services and content, it remains a grand challenge for the future to cross the borders between diverse poles:

- the web and the repository,
- knowledge and technology,
- wild and curated content,
- linked and isolated data,
- disciplinary and institutional systems,
- scholars and service providers,
- ad-hoc and long-term access,
- ubiquitous and personalized environments,
- the cloud and the desktop.

The Open Repositories Conference (6 to 9-JUL-2010 in Madrid, Spain) brings together individuals and organizations responsible for the conception, development, implementation, and management of digital repositories, as well as stakeholders who interact with them for achieving the widest possible integration in theoretical, practical, and strategic matters.

The program of papers, panel discussions, poster presentations, user groups, workshops, and tutorials will reflect the whole community of Open Repositories. Dedicated open source software community meetings for the major platforms (EPrints, DSpace and Fedora) will provide opportunities to advance and coordinate the development of repository installations across the world.

Submission Process

* Conference papers *
We welcome two- to four-page proposals for presentations or panels that deal with theoretical, practical, or administrative issues of digital repositories. Abstracts of accepted papers will be made available through the conferenceís web site; all presentations and related materials used in the program sessions will be deposited in the upcoming virtual conference proceeding of Open Repositories 2010.

* User Group Presentations *
Two- to four-page proposals for presentations or panels that focus on use of one of the major repository platforms (EPrints, DSpace and Fedora) are invited from developers, researchers, repository managers, administrators and practitioners describing novel experiences or developments in the construction and use of repositories.

* Posters *
We invite developers, researchers, repository managers, administrators and practitioners to submit one-page proposals for posters.

* Workshops and Tutorials *
Proposals for workshops require a submission as well and can be accommodated before or after the main conference. For preparatory inquiries about workshop facilities, please contact the local team at <alopezm@pas.uned.es>.

PLEASE submit your paper through the conference system . The conference system will be linked from the conference web site <http://or2010.fecyt.es/> and will be available for submissions as of January 15th, 2010.

The best-rated papers from the conference will be subsequently published in the Journal of Digital Information http://journals.tdl.org/jodi).

Important Dates and Contact Info

- 01-MAR-2010: Submission deadline (papers, user groups, posters, workshops, tutorials)
- 15-APR-2010: Notification of acceptance for conference presentations, workshops/tutorials
- 01-MAY-2010: Notification of acceptance for user group presentations and posters
- 06-JUL-2010: Conference start

DSpace User Group Meeting Contact:  Valorie Hollister <val@dspace.org>
Fedora User Group Meeting Contact:  Thorny Staples <tstaples@duraspace.org>
EPrints User Group Meeting Chair: Les Carr <lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Program Committee Chair: Wolfram Horstmann <whorstmann@uni-bielefeld.de>
Host Organizing Committee: Alicia LÛpez Medina <alopezm@pas.uned.es>

Conference Topics

The committee will consider any submission of sufficient quality and originality that relates to the field of Open Repositories. In the general track, preference will be given to submissions that relate to the theme of “The Grand Integration Challenge” as described in the introduction.

Please regard the following list as a selection of topics that indicates relevant fields.

- Data Curation / Data Archives
- Interoperability with Scholarly and Scientific Applications
- Interactions with Learning Environments
- Generic Workflows and Services
- Integrating Open Repositories with the Grid / Cloud
- Applications in Libraries/Archives
- Disciplinary Requirements

Do you have ideas that relate to different topics? Then please go ahead and address them in your submission!

Download Fedora 3.3 here: http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/x/jQ3S.

Thornton Staples, Director of the Fedora Project from DuraSpace, observed, “The process of developing open-source software with a community-based process requires dedicated effort by many community participants, both developers and users.  Though there is a perception that open-source software gets written by hobbyist programmers working on their own late at night, it is more commonly written by programmers working for institutions that are committed to the software and understand its shared benefits.  FIZ-Karlsruhe has done us all a great service by making Strnad available to manage this release, getting us off to a running start in a community-led development process.”

Chris Wilper, Fedora Technical Lead and Developer from DuraSpace, said, “It’s exciting to see so many contributors stepping forward to take a hand in Fedora’s evolution.  A wide variety of perspectives and a willingness to give back to the community are key to making the Fedora software better for everyone.”

There are many new features in Fedora 3.3 including:

• Support for relationships among datastreams within digital objects, including API methods for manipulating relationships and indexing
• Integration of the Fedora Enhanced Security Layer (FESL), a new community-developed module to support a wider range of authentication methods
• Improvements to the Fedora REST API
• Support for retrieving content using a File URI scheme during ingest
• Support for Microsoft SQL Server
• Support for Mulgara to 2.1.4, proving a significant performance boost
• Upgrade of bundled Tomcat to version 6
• Support for HTTP Proxy server for getting external content
• Improvements and enhancements to the Fedora documentation
• Bug fixes, improving the overall stability of the repository

Many individuals and institutions support the development of the Fedora open source repository software.  The Fedora Project would like to extend thanks to members of the worldwide community whose contributions made the release of Fedora 3.3 possible, especially Benjamin Armintor, Columbia University; Asger Blekinge-Rasmussen, State and University Library, Denmark; Steve Bayliss, Acuity Unlimited; Aaron Birkland, NSDL-Cornell University; Bill Branan, DuraSpace; Daniel Davis, Cornell University; Gert Pedersen, Technical University of Denmark; Edwin Shin, Media Shelf; Kai Strnad, Fedora 3.3 Community Release Manager, FIZ Karlsruhe; Chris Wilper, DuraSpace; and Andrew Woods, DuraSpace.

The Fedora Project is supported by the DuraSpace not-for-profit organization.

GET INVOLVED!
The Fedora development community welcomes new participants. Meetings of the Fedora Committers team are held weekly to discuss overall development strategy, prioritize new features, and plan new releases.  All are welcome to participate or to just listen in.  Archived audio, IRC logs, upcoming meeting agendas, and dial-in details can be found at: http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCREPO/Developer+Meetings.

ABOUT THE FEDORA PROJECT
Fedora (http://Fedora-Commons.org) is a robust, modular repository system for the management and dissemination of digital content. It is especially suited for digital libraries and archives, both for access and preservation. It is also used to provide specialized access to very large and complex digital collections of historic and cultural materials as well as scientific data. Fedora’s flexibility enables it to integrate gracefully with many types of enterprise and web-based systems, offering scalability (e.g., millions of objects) and durability (e.g., all of the information is maintained in files with no software dependency, from which the complete repository can be rebuilt at any time). It also provides the ability to express rich sets of relationships among digital resources and to query the repository using the semantic web’s SPARQL query language. Fedora has a worldwide installed user base that includes academic and cultural heritage organizations, universities, research institutions, university libraries, national libraries, and government agencies.

ABOUT DURASPACE
DuraSpace (http://DuraSpace.org) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. DuraSpace software and services are used worldwide as solutions for open access, institutional repositories, digital libraries, digital archives, data curation, virtual research environments, and more.  DuraSpace provides leadership and innovation in the use of open source and cloud-based technologies to serve libraries, universities, research centers, cultural heritage institutions, and other knowledge stewards.  The organization’s open source technology portfolio includes the DSpace open access repository application, the Fedora open repository platform, and the Mulgara semantic database.  DuraSpace is the home of DuraCloud, an emerging cloud-based service that leverages existing cloud infrastructure to enable durability and access to digital content.  The DuraSpace team includes recognized leaders and experts in the management of digital information.  The team works with an active and diverse international community committed to the durability of digital resources.

The DuraSpace technology portfolio inherently addresses the issue of durability of digital content.  Our values are expressed in our organizational byline, “open technologies for durable digital content.”

The changes in this release are:
• Nested OPTIONAL operations have been fixed. These were being mangled in 2.1.5.
• New functions extensions are available, bringing Mulgara in line
with Jena’s ARQ extensions. All of Jena’s fn and afn functions are now available, as well as a couple of functions from TopQuandrant’s smf namespace.
• Zero argument functions are now permitted.

For the full list of updates, please see the release notes and documentation for details.
Release notes: http://mulgara.org/release.html#v2.1.6
Documentation: http://mulgara.org/trac/wiki/Docs

You can get in touch with us on the mailing lists, or submit a report
to the bug tracker:
http://mulgara.org/trac/report

DuraCloud™ web site: http://duraspace.org/duracloud.php
Sign up to be a DuraCloud™ pilot beta tester: http://duraspace.org/duracloudpilotform.php

Some of the improvements in this release include:

• Results are no longer distinct by default, thereby following SPARQL requirements. TQL also has a new NONDISTINCT keyword.
• UNION operations are significantly optimized for results with duplicates.
• The Prefix resolver can now be used on strings as well as URIs. This has limited application, due to case sensitivity, but is significantly faster than the equivalent filter.

For the full list of updates, please see the release notes and
documentation for details.
Release notes: http://mulgara.org/release.html#v2.1.5
Documentation: http://mulgara.org/trac/wiki/Docs

Please pound on it, and let us know if something breaks. You can get in touch with via the mailing lists, or submit a report to the bug tracker: http://mulgara.org/trac/report

Cloud technologies use remote computers to provide local services through the Internet. DuraCloud is a hosted service and open technology, which allows organizations and end users to effectively utilize public cloud services without having to maintain dedicated technical infrastructure.  The DuraCloud platform builds upon existing cloud infrastructure for the purpose of increasing durability and re-use of digital content.

DuraCloud leaves the basics of pure storage to those who do it best–storage providers– and overlays storage solutions with additional functionality that is essential to ensuring long-term access and ease of use. The service provides baseline functionality that begins with the ability to replicate and distribute content across multiple cloud providers. DuraCloud adds value over and above storage by enabling the deployment of services to support access, preservation, re-use, and sharing of content stored in the cloud.

To access information and presentations about DuraCloud please visit: http://duraspace.org/duracloud.php.

Several significant bugfixes have also been included:

• XML and JSON results are now correctly encoded with UTF-8.
• Graph URIs are no longer canonicalized if they are not in the RMI scheme.
• Improved query planning for some queries. Mulgara’s queries are
still DISTINCT only, so the speed improvements associate with this
change will not appear until 2.1.5.
• Fixed handling of graphs accessed through HTTPS, particularly on Mac.

For the full list of updates, please see the release notes and documentation for details:

• Release notes: http://mulgara.org/release.html#v2.1.4
• Documentation: http://mulgara.org/trac/wiki/Docs

The bug fixes in this release mostly occurred due to your requests. Thanks for your contributions, and please send your feedback. You can get in touch on the mailing lists, or submit a report to the bug tracker: http://mulgara.org/trac/report.

Mulgara is part of the DuraSpace (http://DuraSpace.org)  group of open technology projects characterized by thriving consensus-driven, developer communitites that strive to produce high quality products that ensure sophisticated access and management of long-term durable digital information.

Meeting Details:
Topic: DuraCloud
Date: Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Time: 2:00 pm, Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -04:00, New York)
Meeting Number: 483 677 904
Meeting Password: September09

Please pass this information about joining the session on to those who are particularly interested in digital preservation. If your project or organization would like to share details of the work your doing with the NDIIPP community in a WebEx seminar, please let email Michelle Gallinger at mgal@loc.gov.

Here is an example of the kind of story we are interested in:

Studs Terkel said,”Chicago’s story is a tale of people. People working, playing, fighting, organizing, relaxing, politicking, loving, hating, building, and everything else that makes a city hum. The Encyclopedia of Chicago has those people. It is their story.” (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/grossman/index.html). The online version of the Encyclopedia of Chicago (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/410150.html) reflects that rich history in all of its grit and glamour and runs on top of a Fedora Commons repository.  In a presentation about how users interact with image collections using Encyclopedia of Chicago online tools Librarian and archivist Sarah Marcus, Historian and Managing Editor, Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago History Museum, noted that one student had zoomed in on a great pair of shoes captured in an image of the 1949 White City Roller Rink Demonstration because she was particularly interested in fashion. Although the fashions that people were wearing on the street at that time were not the context in which the photograph was cataloged or displayed, serendipitous access to this obscure image from long ago through an open access respository may have inspired a young fashion designer in her work.

Submit your entry online at http://duraspace.org/contest.php through September 28, 2009. DuraSpace SPARC Open Access Week Contest winners will be announced on October 1, 2009. Winners will receive $50 Amazon gift certificates and will be invited to tell their stories during the Sun/DuraSpace/SPARC “All About Repositories” Web Seminar on Oct. 14, 2009. Screenshots and other media are welcome and should be submitted separately to Carol Minton Morris.

Some of the major changes in this release:

• Reintroduced a Jena interface courtesy of Andy Seaborne’s JenaMulgara bridge. JenaMulgara is a bridge between the Jena API, a Java-based framework for writing semantic web applications and Mulgara, an RDF database, written in Java. The objective of the bridge is to provide the complete set of Jena APIs working on data stored in a Mulgara database.

There is still optimization work to be done, but it should be fully functional. Please see the Interfaces page for details: http://mulgara.org/trac/wiki/UserInterfaces

• Variable assignment in SPARQL, using a syntax of LET (var := …)

• User configuration files now only require the fields to be changed
from default values.

• Fixed escape codes in JSON results.

• Fixed entity escaping in XML results.

• Fixed incorrect paths in the WebUI when deployed on Tomcat.

For the full list of updates, please see the release notes and documentation for details:

Release notes: http://mulgara.org/release.html#v2.1.2
Documentation: http://mulgara.org/trac/wiki/Docs

Please pound on it, and contact us if something breaks. You can get in touch through mailing lists, or submit a report to the bug tracker: http://mulgara.org/trac/report.

“The Semantic Web isn’t just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data.  With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data. ” (http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html)

“People have different ideas about what the Semantic Web really is,” said  Gearon.  In his case it is the use of Semantic Web standards as defined by the W3C. It is these standards–the RDF standard in particular–that Mulgara implements and supports
(http://www.w3.org/RDF/). The application of this standard allows you to do a number of things.

RDF is a framework that allows you to describe stuff. Individual “Things” are provided with identifiers known as URIs, which can then be given multiple characteristics to describe these individuals. Any abstract concept or real person or thing can be given an a unique identifier. A company is an abstract personification concept, for example, and can be given an identifier. Individuals can then be related in arbitrary ways, which enables the data to become a “Web.” The choice of URIs for identifiers then allows this web to extend across the internet to other data, opening up a whole world of opportunities.

URIs can be used to describe people and “things” that are part of organizations or universities, for example.  Knowing the relationships between these entities lets you know what to look for. People versus books can be recognized because types are defined by RDF. “While some level of semantics can be encoded in RDF, true semantics are an emergent property as the connections build up into a coherent network of information,” explains Gearon.

Information about the Semantic Web

•Linked Data Web site: http://linkeddata.org/
•London Meetup for “Linked Data–Connect Distributed Data across the Web”
Sept. 9, 2009: http://linkeddata.org/events/london-meetup-september-2009
•Paul Miller’s Cloud of Data blog provides Semantic Web insights and resources: http://cloudofdata.com/

Features to note in this release are:
- Updates to the Web user interface. See http://mulgara.org/trac/wiki/WebUI
- A new Command Line interface.
- New relative and parameterized graph URIs.
- A completely revamped Lucene resolver for full text queries.
- Numerous minor bugfixes and code cleanup.

Full details can be found at: http://mulgara.org/release.html#v2.0.7. Bug reports and feature requests can be logged with our tracking system at:
http://mulgara.org/trac/newticket.

Notable new features in this release include:
- A servlet providing a SPARQL Protocol endpoint.
- SPARQL support in the Web User Interface.
- Improvements to the storage layer, speeding up large loads, while using less space and fewer files. This release also addresses an administrative error in the last two releases where binaries were created for Java 6 instead of Java 5.

Full details can be found at: http://mulgara.org/release.html#v2.0.6. Bug reports and feature requests can be logged with our tracking system at: http://mulgara.org/trac/newticket.

Fixes:

• Removed a symlink that documented javacc as version 4.0. A poorly written task was trying to pick up this link as a real file, which doesn’t work on Windows.
• Fixed the namespace map in the RDF/XML writer so it can’t accidentally use a generated URI in an export.

Cleanup:

• Removed unnecessary config files from the mulgara-core distribution.

New Features:

• Created a cut-down default config file for the mulgara-core distribution.

For full details see the release notes at:
http://mulgara.org/release.html#v2.0.5

You can download Mulgara 2.0.5 at:
http://mulgara.org/download.html