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NOW AVAILABLE: Fedora 4 Production Release- Not Your Dad's Fedora

Press Release - December 4, 2014

Contact: David Wilcox

Groundbreaking new capabilities make Fedora 4 the repository platform of choice for right now and into the future.

Winchester, MA The international Fedora repository community and DuraSpace are very pleased to announce the production release of Fedora 4. This significant release signals the effectiveness of an international and complex community source project in delivering a modern repository platform with features that meet or exceed current use cases in the management of institutional digital assets. Fedora 4 features include vast improvements in scalability, linked data capabilities, research data support, modularity, ease of use and more. Fedora 4 features were collaboratively chosen and developed by a virtual team of developers and stakeholders from around the globe. With DuraSpace support this committed team has ensured that Fedora Repository software will meet the emerging needs of the academic research community now and for the next decade.

Community Kudos

Robin Ruggaber, Chair of the Fedora Steering Group and Library Chief Technology Officer at the University of Virginia commented on Fedora’s achievements: “The success of the Fedora community today is rooted in the way it operates. The community members govern, fund, shape and produce the solution to meet global repositories’ needs and performance requirements. The development is based on what product owners need and is managed so that everyone in the community can contribute without individually exhausting human or financial resources. We are maximizing the power of distributed development and ownership and are rewarded with a sustainable, low risk, moderate cost solution.” Stefano Cossu, Director of Application Services, Collections at The Art Institute of Chicago offered his reasons for adopting Fedora 4: “We have searched far and wide for a system that could store our large and diverse collection of art objects and their related assets, integrate in a complex architecture of legacy applications and data sources, and make our digital resources available in a wide variety of ways. We have adopted Fedora 4 very early for its scalability and flexibility in all its aspects, its adhesion to solid standards, the project's long-sighted goals and the extremely talented and motivated community around it.”

Fedora 4 support for linked data—what it means for you

The broad concept of linked data is the idea that the semantic web can connect everything. Fedora 4 makes that concept real. With built-in linked data support Fedora 4 offers the ability to develop discovery tools in compliance with the W3C Linked Data Platform specification. The long-held linked data promise of broad and deeply faceted discovery on the open web is based on the concept that information can be exchanged using the resource description framework (RDF) as a standard model. The ability to share data openly and take advantage of the semantic web means that content is not “inside a silo” that can only be discovered and re-used if repository software adheres to standardization and interoperability. With Fedora 4 the “Web is a repository” providing new kinds of digital collections and data sources for services and applications.

Scalability—how big is big

As larger data sets, larger files, research data and multimedia use cases have emerged in the community Fedora 4 is set to meet the challenge of improved scalability. Fedora 4 repositories can manage millions and millions of digital files along with extremely large files of any type running on top of back-end storage systems. This means that petabytes of storage are available to you because Fedora can potentially operate on top of any storage system via a pluggable, expandable connector framework.

Flexibility and extensibility—plugging into what works

The strength of Fedora repository software lies in it’s native flexibility and extensibility. Fedora 4 architecture builds on a lightweight core model with multiple, pluggable components and a standard set of robust APIs.

Security

Fedora 4 provides a pluggable, extensible security framework capable of supporting a variety of authorization systems. Two initial systems have been implemented—role-based authorization and XACML. A third, based on the emerging W3C Web Access Control standard, is currently being planned. By decoupling security from the repository core, Fedora 4 supports existing authorization standards rather than maintaining a custom security framework.

Clustering

Clustering connects multiple Fedora 4 nodes in a network providing horizontal repository scaling for high-availability use cases. By configuring two or more replicated Fedora 4 nodes to run behind a load-balancer, you can evenly distribute web traffic between the nodes to maximize performance.

Fedora 3.8–a solid release to cap off the 3.0 line

Fedora 3.8 has always been planned as a part of Fedora 4 development. The aim was to cap off the 3.0 line with a solid release for the user community. The Fedora 3.8 release features an improved REST API interaction with correct headers returned for better caching along with performance improvements and bug fixes.

DOWNLOAD Fedora 3.8: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA38/Downloads 

DOCUMENTATION: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA38/Fedora+3.8+Documentation

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