Fedora Day at OR08 began as 50 Fedora Commons t-shirts with two different slogans flew off a table outside a lecture hall at the University of Southampton, UK. Fedora users, organizers, developers, vendors, and planners were assembled as part of the Third International Open Repositories Conference to share ideas and discuss future plans for the Fedora Commons organization and software framework. Executive director Sandy Payette began her welcoming remarks and technical overview by asking the over 137 participants in an packed lecture hall to “tell us what you think in the Fedora Commons sloganfest”—in exchange for a t-shirt. The two Fedora Commons slogan candidates are “Connecting Digital Content to the Future,” (the explicit message) and “All Ways, Always” (the implicit message).

Payette delivered a quick overview of Fedora’s history and mission stressing that engaging the diverse and motivated user and developer communities has resulted in a strong core platform that is flexible and extensible with a wealth of community-created, related technical innovations. “The more people who participate, the stronger the software will be,” she said. She also emphasized Fedora Commons commitment to additional community-focused documentation that gets at a sense of what best practices are, and noted “Fedora Commons open source projects can be integrated together.”

New types of durable digital objects, solutions for data, enabling use and re-use, bridging web and enterprise solutions, and more open source integrations are all part of current ideas driven by use cases that include scholarly and scientific research and communication; data curation, linking, and publishing; preservation and archiving; knowledge spaces that include a variety of educational settings; and more.

In 2008 Fedora Commons Director of Community Strategies Thorny Staples will initiate “Community Solution Councils,” championed by community leaders. The Open Access Publication Solution Council will be led by Richard Cave, Public Library of Science; The Data Curation, Solution Council will be led by Sayeed Choudhury, the Preservation and Archiving Solution Council will be led by Ron Janz. An eResearch Solution Council is also planned.
Solution Councils will create a vision and requirements for each of these areas, moving towards community developed end-to-end solution bundles.

She offered a top-level summary of framework components:
Fedora Repository project
–the original Fedora Project
Fedora Middleware Project
–service integration and enterprise-orientation for repositories
Akubra Storage Project
–New storage plug-in architecture; transactional file system
Topaz Project
–Fedora Commons incubating; core componentn for semantic-enabled apps
Mulgara Triplestore Project
–Independent, Fedora supported developer; highly scalable triplestore.

She explained that Dan Davis, Fedora Commons Chief Architect, has launched “The Fedora Commons Technology Roadmap” to better meet the planning needs of community members. Payette described the “permanent draft document” as an evolving and changing view as the community gives feedback. The Fedora Commons roadmap is somewhat like the Eclipse model that includes an overview, themes, priorities, and release plans. The Fedora Commons Roadmap consists of an overview with drill-down to a table that includes the feature name, action (where it is in development), availability (when?) and notes. Please visit the Roadmap now on the web site at http://fedora-commons.org/resources/roadmap.php. and send comments.

A Q and A followed:

Q: What are thinking of in terms of sheer scale? We in Europe and looking at unestimated jumps in scale with data.”

SP: We need to understand what is the maximum vertical scale we can expect—what is max and what are pinch points—both Sun and FIZ Karlsruhe are working on this. Architectural strategies for how pedabyte storage exists behind Fedora—how it pokes into that data are significant. We need to further understand dimensions of scalability.

Q: I would like to know more about content models.

We want a basic set and then we would like to plug other validators in from the community. We want to show the richer ones.